i 



THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY 



^tc0mt Claim anti 3Cttraction 



AND OTHER WRITINGS 



THEODORE C. PEASE 

EARTLET PROFESSOR OF SACRED RHETORIC IN ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 

WITH AN INTRODVCTIOX BY 
PROFESSOR EGBERT C. SMYTH, D. D. 



EDITED BY 

"THE FORTNIGHTLY CLUB' 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 1/ 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANT ^ 
(<Cf)c fiitJerjeiDc press, Cambriboc 

189-1 



Copyright, 1894, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Printed by H. O. Houghton and Company. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

INTRODUCTION. 

Bj Professor Egbert C. Smyth, D. D. . . v 
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH xii 

INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 

The Christian Ministry : Its Present Claim and 

Attraction ....... 1 

LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 
1. Primitive and Fundamental Elements in Preaching 46 
II. Relation of Homiletics to Logic, Rhetoric, and 

Eloquence ....... 79 

SERMONS. 

I. " Called to be Saints " 110 

II. The Enigma of Life 125 

ESSAY ON DANTE. 

Dante's Vision of Sin and Judgment : A Study of 

the Inferno ....... 141 

POEMS AND HYMNS. 

Era Angelico 173 

Sunrise on Mount Moosilauke . . . .174 
Memories from Over Sea . . . . 175-181 

" Peace, be Still " 182 

Feed My Lambs" 182 

The Return from the Mountain .... 184 
For the Communion Season .... 186 
The Last Easter ....... 189 



IN MEMORIAM. 



Skies were not yet red with sunset, far off still the evening bell, 
Only sights and sounds of midday eye and ear could seem to tell, 
And we knew not that our greeting was the greeting of farewell, 

Did not know, in our rejoicing, that the hour had waxed so late, 
That the tides were sobbing seaward which can neither turn nor wait, 
And already in our presence stood the Opener of the Gate. 

Thin the veil that hides the future we have never seen nor can ; 
But that future somehow mingles strangely in the life of man. 
While we see in part, and only see in part, the Father' s plan. 

Every life hath its completeness — Are there not twelve hours still 
In the day ? — And whosoever makes his own the Master'' s will, 
Living, dying, staying, going, doth the circle all fulfill. 

Friend of ours, we did not tell thee all we might have told that day ; 
Many another thing we cherished in our heart of hearts to say, 
Sad we known it was eocpedient thou so soon shouldst go away. 

We were looking for achievement, and the victory had been won; 
For the golden years of service — with the sands so nearly run ; 
Yea, we thought it the beginning, when God said thy work vjas done. 

We shall not forget thee — never, while the ivay before us toioers ; 
Something from thy life in passing touched the inner springs in ours ; 
Thou henceforth art in alliance there with God^s uplifting powers. 

Thou art here ; lo, thou art yonder, where the heavenly seasons roll, 
Where in light and life immortal ends the pathway of the soul, — 
One hand beckoning, and the other resting on the shining goal. 

S. V. COLE. 

" The Fortnightly November 27, 1893. 



INTEODUCTION. 



This little volume deserves attention apart from 
its memorial character. Its level and range o£ 
thought, and its literary quality, are of a high 
order. Those especially who would cultivate the 
power of apt and effective public speaking will 
find in it much that is helpful. 

It is capable of a yet higher service, and for a 
wider circle. Whatever presents to the mind a 
true ideal, and quickens the energies necessary to 
its pursuit, has a universal value and is fitted to 
gain permanent influence. This ideal may spe- 
cially concern a particular profession, yet its eleva- 
tion and nobleness belong to all pure and lofty 
aims and bring them to view, and the strenuous 
purpose revealed in its pursuit in any direction of 
effort is identical or accordant with the resolution 
demanded for the cultivation of excellence in all 
other spheres in which it may be attained. It is 
in this way that the following pages, even those 
most exclusively occupied with the objects and 
methods of a single calling, will attract and influ- 
ence, it is hoped, men of other vocations, and, in- 



vi 



INJRODUCTION. 



deed, so far as they become known, every generous 
and aspiring mind. This their wider adaptation 
and import will doubtless appear at once to any 
one who will carefully peruse them. Yet a brief 
reference to some facts personal to the author of 
the lectures, sermons, and other productions here 
gathered together may not be superfluous. 

Professor Pease was endowed with unusual gifts 
for linguistic and literary pursuits. The Latin, 
Greek, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, Italian 
languages were easily at his command, and he was 
unusually conversant with the best in their litera- 
tures. He had a strong natural predilection for 
aesthetic studies. The call came to him to take up 
the work of a preacher of the gospel and of a 
pastor. Fearing lest his love of helles lettres^ if he 
wrote his sermons, would hazard or mar their es- 
sential quality as addresses, converting them more 
or less into essays, he early determined to speak 
to men directly and under the influence of their 
immediate presence. Perfecting in every way his 
conception of the possible power and highest ob- 
jects of such address, he gave himself with remark- 
able assiduity and strength of resolution to the 
realization of his ideal. He was first and most of 
all a diligent student of the Word of God, reading 
it in the original languages with critical care, catch- 
ing with ear attent the very " accent of the Holy 



INTRODUCTION. 



vii 



Ghost." The cure of souls was to him an impor- 
tant part of his ministry, and intimately connected 
with the material and aim of his preaching. He 
endeavored to enter into the meaning and progress 
of the lives, into the intimate needs, of his people 
in his successive charges. He spoke from life to 
life. The subjects of his sermons were thoughtfully 
selected ; their materials carefully collected and ar- 
ranged ; orderliness and lucidity reigned supreme. 
Their diction was a triumph of an art which was 
wholly concealed, and was gained by a severe dis- 
cipline and the use of a definite and intelligent 
method. As I have intimated, the forms of speech 
which Mr. Pease used in preaching were not fixed 
in advance by reducing them to writing. Neither 
were they in general committed to memory. Free 
room and play were left for the inspirations which 
come to a prepared speaker when fully enlisted and 
engaged in actual discourse. Apart from the special 
and immediate preparation of the matter of his dis- 
course, his method was to perfect himself in the 
English tongue so that in the delivery of his ser- 
mon, in the expression of his thought when face to 
face with an audience, he would be in command of 
this lano'uao'e as a musician is master of the instru- 
ment on which he plays. His vocabulary became 
at once copious and select by a veritable conquest 
of words, acquiring them by wresting from them 



viii 



INTRODUCTION. 



the secret of their individual weight and force, and 
by familiarity with them in their choicest uses; 
training his ear also to their energy or delicacy, 
and fixing them in memory, by often repeating 
them aloud. One way in which he enlarged the 
range of his vocabulary, and at the same time made 
it more select and serviceable, was the daily, or at 
least regular and. persevering, oral translation into 
English from foreign authors whose diction was 
most marked by the note of distinction. This 
practice aided memory by associating the sound of 
the word with its characters, and also rendered 
more flexible the organs of speech. The result in 
his own preaching was marked. With but few 
notes, he spoke with an easy command of language 
which was so natural and perfect as to be almost 
unnoticed save by those who reflected upon what 
was occurring. The words were but the thought, 
the theme, the motive which stirred to action. They 
were a lucid atmosphere, the medium of vision. If 
their force or beauty arrested attention, it was as the 
form which the spiritual reality they embodied most 
naturally assumed. Mere fluency may diminish 
expression, and is not a rare nor difficult attain- 
ment. The choice of the right word, the unfettered 
use of language appropriate to thoughts that range 
from earth to heaven, the spontaneous selection of 
forms and sounds that vary to the changing note 



INTRODUCTION. 



ix 



and onward movement of persuasive discourse ; of 
words that with the Spirit's power bring conviction 
of sin, righteousness, and judgment, that strengthen 
for conflict and minister consolation, that point out 
plainly the path the Saviour trod, and move men 
to follow Him, is quite another art and far more 
difficult to gain. 

Yet it is not a particular method, or its success, 
to which I desire most to call attention, or which 
lends to this volume, as already noticed, its distinc- 
tive worth. It stands for life in its highest mood 
and consecration. What has any one better to do, 
or for which stimulus and help are of more value 
to him, than to strive after the best ? 

I scarcely have known a more pathetic termi- 
nation of a public career than the close of Mr. 
Pease's life. He had been called to the chair of 
Sacred Rhetoric and Pastoral Theology in Andover 
Seminary with a delightful unanimity. His accept- 
ance of the office had been deliberate and conscien- 
tious, and marked by a conviction that his life had 
led him up to this special work. He entered on di- 
rect preparation for it with an enthusiasm, modest, 
quiet, controlled, yet clear and strong, and from 
unfailing fountains. Many gathered to listen to 
his inaugural, to welcome him to the work he was 
undertaking. How bright were the growing and 
fruitful years that seemed to lie before him. He 



X 



INTRODUCTION, 



mapped out his course of lectures, was about to 
enter on their delivery, and his voice was stilled. 

To our Christian faith there are no uncom- 
pleted lives for those who are one with the Con- 
queror of the grave. Yet, besides this deepest of 
consolations, is the solace, that here, within our 
earthly horizons, and in so brief a time, there had 
been so genuine and noble an achievement. He 
who had thus wrought and succeeded had seen the 
heavenly vision, which in its own divine way 
comes to all, and had been obedient to it. Choos- 
ing a special form of service, he had made perfec- 
tion in it his aim. All his life was smitten by 
the love of the ideal. And there was in this life 
something yet more important to be noticed, for it 
is more rare and stimulating; the resolve, the 
unalterable decision, to attain to what he saw, a 
power and majesty ever commanding him and 
beckoning him on. The inaugural address, and 
the opening lectures he was to have delivered, have 
from this point of view an imperishable charm. 
They mean what one man saw as a worthy aim, 
and what he had been willing to do for it, and this 
not as a transient impulse or purj)ose, but as a daily 
consecration and unintermitting and strenuous en- 
deavor. The few other productions which accom- 
pany those just referred to also serve, each in its 
own way, to illustrate the same significance of his 



INTRODUCTION, xi* 

life. The clergymen, whose affectionate remem- 
brance of their brother and desire to widen his 
influence, and the parishioners who have assisted 
them in executing this purpose, in offering this 
volume to the public, know full well how little it 
suggests of his ministerial work, and how inade- 
quately it represents his preaching. A life which 
had sacrificed literary aims in obedience to a call 
for direct and active ser^^ce in the Christian min- 
istry, had cut itself off from the early preparation 
of works for publication. 

I knew and loved Mr. Pease as a pupil. His 
scholarship was accurate, his fidelity constant, his 
simj^licity and sincerity of character marked and 
attractive. AYith peculiar pleasure he was wel- 
comed to his chair of instruction. If he had lived 
to enter fully on its duties he would have been, be- 
yond question, a fit and distinguished teacher of 
preachers. 

This volume, brief as it is, contains and reveals 
the secret of all true power. It testifies to a life 
which aimed, in deep sincerity, in humility, in full- 
ness of consecration, with a constant and victori- 
ous resoluteness, to achieve what is ideally best 
and of all things the most real. We are impressed 
anew with the power of such an ideal when taken 
up into a human will. 

E. C. S. 

A^^D0VER Theological Seminary, May 8, 1894. 



BIOGEAPHICAL SKETCH. 

Theodore Claudius Pease was born in the 
city of Poughkeepsie, New York, on the 14th of 
October, 1853. The few available facts as to his 
lineage and early years are thus given in his own 
words in the records of his class at Harvard : — 

"The origin of the name Pease is uncertain. 
But as a coat of arms granted to the family by 
Otho II. of Germany has a pea haulm in an eagle's 
beak, the name is probably connected in some way 
with the pea plant. Whether the family came first 
from Germany or Italy is a disputed point. The 
first individual of the name of whom we have any 
record was John Pease, LL. D., who lived in Eng- 
land A. D. 1472. One branch of the family traces 
its descent to Robert Pease, who came from Ips- 
wich, England) the last of April, 1634, and settled 
in Salem. His second son, John, removed from 
Salem to Fresh Water Brook, which was then a 
part of Springfield, Massachusetts, but is now 
Thompsonville, Connecticut. His second son, Rob- 
ert, removed to the adjoining town of Enfield in 
1681, and is said to have been one of the first con- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xiii 

stables of that town. His second son, Robert, 
lived for a time in Andover, Massachusetts, but 
afterwards settled in that part of Enfield, Connect- 
icut, now called Somers. His fourth son was born 
in Somers, June 28, 1739, and lived in his native 
town as a farmer. He was a lieutenant in the 
Revolution. His eldest son, Giles, was born in 
Somers, April 13, 1763. He was a merchant, and 
held the office of justice of the peace. 

" His eldest son, born at Somers, January 30, 
1789, was named Theodore. He settled in Hartford 
as a merchant, but died at the age of thirty, July 
26, 1819. His second son, my father, Claudius Bu- 
chanan, was born in Somers, April 22, 1815. He 
was a merchant for ten years in Georgia, and six 
years in New Orleans, La. Then he engaged in 
the lumber business in New York city, living in 
Poughkeepsie, and afterwards was a paper manu- 
facturer in Springfield, Mass. 

"My mother, whose name before her marriage was 
Elvira Ann Smith, was the daughter of Jonathan 
and Elvira Parsons Smith." She was a woman of 
noble character and of rare refinement and culture, 
and her son inherited from her, as he believed, his 
love for literature and his facility in language. 
She died at Poughkeepsie, April 30, 1855, at the 
age of thirty-four years, six months and six days. 

" I was then, when two years and a half old, 



xiv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

taken to Somers, where I lived with my father's 
mother and sister. When I was twelve and a half 
years old this sister of my father's, my aunt Sarah, 
died, and my father came to Somers, where he re- 
mained till I was sixteen, at which time we removed 
to Springfield. I fitted for college partly with Pro- 
fessor Eipley, who established a home school in 
Somers, and mostly at the Springfield High School, 
under Mr. O. M. Fernald, since professor of Greek 
in Williams College, then classical instructor in 
this school, to whom its graduates owed largely the 
excellent preparation for college which they re- 
ceived." 

This record shows the growth, on the stock of a 
typical New England family rooted in the soil of 
an ordinary New England village, of the beautiful 
character and talent which this book commem- 
orates. It has a further value as portraiture, for it 
bears witness thus early to the wi'iter's love of de- 
tail, eagerness for all the facts that might cast 
light on the subject in hand, and careful habit of 
research and statement which led him to set down 
with accuracy, and with even greater fullness than 
our abridgment shows, all available particulars in 
a record to be closed unread, and sealed in the 
vaults of a safe deposit. 

This trait is observed in the earliest recollections 
we have of his childhood. An occasional inmate 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. XY 



of the home remembers him ''at an age when he 
was not too old to sit on her knee, and yet old 
enough to love books and reading, and to talk of 
them as he sat there." Into his studies he entered 
with such zest that at school he had no rivals. 
But his chief delight was in " a precious old an- 
thology of prose and verse, which he searched for 
treasures to read, talk of, repeat, or make the 
model of his own expression. He was a happy 
child, the light and sunshine of the home, loving 
and lovable, full of breezy life and fun." Like all 
boys in country homes, he had his share of the 
tasks and " chores " about the place. These he 
seems to have disliked, in the degree that they were 
solitary ; but whether to his taste or not, " he al- 
ways did them obediently, and with the same thor- 
oughness that marked all his work through life. 
There were no more weeds left in the garden bed 
when he had finished than there were inaccuracies 
in his New Testament work in after life. The 
child was father of the man." The proverb ap- 
plies with even greater force to his love and gift 
of reading mentioned above. This grew with his 
growth, and became a great talent, so that whoever 
knew him at all knew of this. The swiftness, the 
persistence, the range and variety of his reading, 
which made all literature both in ancient and mod- 
ern tongues his domain, the power to possess and 



xvi BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

retain the substance, and if he pleased the verbal 
form of what he read, and to estimate, digest, and 
assimilate it, may fairly be compared with the like 
gift of Macaulay, and, as in the case of Macaulay, 
was the amazement of his friends, impressing most 
those who knew him best. On the early beginnings 
of this passion and practice we have his own testi- 
mony. The only portion of the little autobio- 
gTaphy from which we have quoted that leaves sim- 
ple facts for anything like a personal " confession " 
is the closing paragraph. 

" My love for reading has always been greater 
than for any kind of amusement. But a small 
country town afforded little opportunity for its 
gratification, and the taste was but poorly directed. 
My present mother, formerly a principal of Mount 
Holyoke Seminary, whose maiden name was Mary 
W. Chapin, has assisted me largely ; and from our 
removal to Springfield my eyes alone have set the 
bounds to my unlimited enjoyment of books. I 
well remember how much of school hours even I 
spent in reading the songs in ' Chambers's Cyclo- 
paedia of English Literature,' a copy of which was 
kept in school for reference. In college the same 
devotion to reading has continued, and the gratifi- 
cation of this, and an equally boundless love of 
writing, has proved the most delightful, if not the 
most valuable, part of my college work. My plans 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xvii 

for life are quite undeveloped as yet, but I trust 
that opportunities to gratify these two tastes will 
not be wanting." 

The impression of his mental bent thus gained 
is deepened by the witness of all who knew him in 
college. His record of scholarship and social stand- 
ing, as marked by rank, honors, and offices, is cred- 
itable. He stood first of the second ten in his 
class. In Freshman year he received one of the 
Lee prizes for reading, and at the beginning of 
the Sophomore year a " detur," — Walton's Lives. 
He w^as a member of the society of Christian Bre- 
thren, of the Everett Athenaeum, of the 11. H. 
and the O. K., and the B. K. societies. From the 
middle of his Sophomore to the middle of his Sen- 
ior year, he was editor of the "Advocate." He was 
Odist at the Sophomore Class Supper, and was 
elected Class Poet at graduation. This latter part 
was done with great distinction, and received 
marked attention from Professor James Russell 
Lowell, who, during the last two years of his 
course at least, favored him with his acquaintance 
and society, and guided him in his reading, his 
style, and especially his study and practice of the 
forms of verse. It was in lines like these that he 
was set apart from his classmates, and, at least in 
poetical gift, from the men of his time in college. 

His general fame at Harvard arose chiefly out 



xviii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



of his work on the " Advocate," to which he con- 
tributed an extraordinary number of articles, more 
than sixty-five in all. Scarcely an issue appeared 
without some verse above his initials. Many of 
these were reprinted in periodicals of wider circu- 
lation ; and in the volume of " Verses from the 
Harvard Advocate," which preserved in more per- 
manent form the best poetry of the first twelve 
years of its issue, only two competitors approached 
him in the number of poems found worthy of in- 
sertion, while his contributions exceed those of 
both of them together. His literary and linguistic 
aptitudes were thought phenomenal. He ab- 
sorbed a language, and tongues dead or living 
were real vestibules whereby he entered into a 
knowledge of the life and thought of ancient or 
modern peoples." This judgment of a classmate 
and lifelong friend, who has since won distinction 
in the same profession, like all else that is said of 
him in youth, casts a light forward over his whole 
life, which, as the same writer says, "was a nat- 
ural development of what he was in college." His 
room, his hands, his pockets are remembered as 
loaded with books. His head seemed full of their 
contents, especially of poetry, which on occasion 
would flow in streams from his lips. All this will 
seem to those who knew him later as said of him 
but yesterday. There were favorite authors, and 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xix 

passages, or poems, to which he must introduce 
every new friend. For how many has he been 
a guide to Dante, or Plato, or Browning, or New- 
man, or whatever author each man's specialty or 
aptitude would respond to ? Yet neither then nor 
later was there any touch of conceit, of pedantry 
or patronage in this. He hated ostentation and dis- 
play ; modesty and reserve were an unfailing ele- 
ment in his charm. But he loved beauty, and he 
loved his fellows, and whether his companion were 
child or adult, man or woman, it was his nature to 
share every treasure of his own which he felt would 
be welcome. To this he was impelled in part by a 
fine passion for expression, but even more by the 
nobler delight in impartation. 

As one said of him in later years, he had a gen- 
ius for friendship and comradeship. This, we have 
seen, was noted in his childhood. To many of his 
classmates this seemed his most notable trait. His 
work was done easily and naturally ; it seemed no 
more to absorb him than breathing, and left him 
undiminished spirits and leisure for companion- 
ship. " His room was a social centre for a con- 
genial set. His recreations and even his tasks he 
preferred to do in company." " He was healthy, 
cheerful, friendly, entertaining, full of wit and 
merriment, and often in high states of mental and 
emotional happiness.'* " Yet no degree of hilarity, 



XX BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



no provocation of his sense of humor, ever betrayed 
him into a vulgar word." " He was high-minded, 
pure, guileless, sensitive, poetic." " A lover of 
beauty, moral and intellectual, he was never heard 
to say anything to mar the sweet purity of his 
ideal." 

Two years before he entered college, in October, 
1869, when fifteen years old, he joined the Con- 
gregational church in Somers, Conn. From his 
Freshman year he was a member of the Christian 
Brethren, and "in class-meetings, Christian Bre- 
thren meetings, and in personal intercourse, he ex- 
hibited a high standard of Christian life." " He 
was also among the first members of a little society 
founded in his Freshman year, under the name of 
'YTTT^peVat Xpto-TOL', and which consisted of men from 
different classes looking forward to the Christian 
ministry." 

The influences and inclinations leading him into 
his life's calling reach further back, and lie deeper 
than our scanty light enables us to follow. The 
tone of uncertainty in the closing sentence of his 
class record, and perhaps the interval of two years 
which he let pass between Harvard and Andover, 
given in part to teaching literature in Annapolis 
Naval Academy, seem to show that his purpose 
was not settled when he left college. For aspi- 
rants to the ministry those were times of great 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxi 

mental perplexity. There was a breach between 
the church, its faith and ideal, and the world in 
the light of modern learning and activity, which 
the teaching and example of ministers like himself 
have helped to remove. But though he took time 
to know his mind and his duty, he always sought 
the determining impulses to his calling as far back 
as the confines of his earliest remembrance, and 
felt his vocation to be coeval with his life. " I 
have long known," he said when he received his 
license to preach, that I could never be anything 
else than a Christian minister." 

He received his special training for the minis- 
try in Andover Theological Seminary, where after 
three years of study he was graduated in 1880. 
In August of the same year he was married to 
Abby Frances Cutter, who, with her oldest and 
only surviving child, Arthur Stanley Pease, is now 
living in Andover, Massachusetts. 

In June of his Senior year in the Seminary he 
received and accepted a call to the Congregational 
Church in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, a town 
lying on the Connecticut River opposite to White 
River Junction, and four miles south of Dart- 
mouth College, in a region beautifully mingling 
the charms of hill and river scenery. The parish 
includes a quiet, thrifty, little village with outlying 
farms. A young ladies' seminary in the place 



XXIV 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



suggesting conscientious sincerity and consecration. 
A thoughtful, powerful, practical sermon, grace- 
fully and feelingly delivered, — an inspiration to a 
better life/' 

This singular communication to a daily paper, and 
evidently unbiased tribute of a passing stranger, 
precipitated an inevitable crisis in the career of 
the preacher thus signalized. It naturally arrested 
the attention of churches seeking a minister, and 
led to his being heard, and in the end called by the 
First Congregational Church in Maiden, Mass. 

This church is one of the three or four oldest in 
Xew Eno^land, havino; its beoinnino-s as far back as 
1648. The traditions of its long and honored line 
of pastors set an exacting ideal. It was the only 
church of its faith and order in the heart of the 
town, which grew rapidly, doubling its population 
in the nine years of this pastorate, during which 
the church added as many new names to its roll as 
it had resident members when Mr. Pease came to 
it. It served its large and outspread constituency 
not only in the various services of the central meet- 
ing house, but through several branches, some of 
which were started under him, and one developed 
into an independent church. 

To supply the needs of this busy, growing church, 
this broad parish, these hundreds of families, the 
new pastor labored, fulfilling every function with 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, 



XXV 



unwearied faithfulness. This pastorate, no less 
than the former one, was a period of growth, en- 
largement, ripening. But it bears the special mark 
of work and service. 

He maintained his habits of study and culture, 
still foUowino: lines, some of which had eno^ao-ed 
him in youth. Each day saw its canto of Dante 
read in the original, until, ere he closed it for the 
last time, he had been through the Commedia " 
nearly seventy times. His critical, textual study 
of the Hebrew and Greek, and rapid reading of 
the English version of the Bible kept on, with 
growing concentration of interest. More or less 
directly everything became tributary to this, and 
to his study of the theory and art of preaching, to 
which more and more definitely he gave himself, as 
if drawn intuitively and by the compulsion of a 
divine call to the work which in the end was to 
claim him, and to which he was fitted and dedi- 
cated. 

Yet all this was secondary and incidental to his 
service of his people. He was a busy, working, 
careful pastor, giving the best and most of his time 
and strength, and heart as well, to the burden of 
service, responsibility, sympathy, instruction, min- 
istry ; various, incessant, accumulating, no atom of 
which he would shirk, which he loved to bear. He 
never suffered a personal interest to interfere, never 



xxvi BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



spared himself, if any light, comfort, or power from 
the gospel could come through him to any single 
soul. Only his rare facility, versatility, and healthy 
vitality of mind and body enabled him to bear this 
steady and increasing strain without disaster. Too 
ready, we cannot but fear, he was to spend and be 
spent, too willing to make one of those slow, silent, 
often unnoticed offerings, of ministers who joy and 
rejoice to be poured out upon the sacrifice and ser- 
vice of the faith of their churches. 

There is an eloquent monument of this patient, 
fruitful service in the pastor's record, which shows 
the number, variety, and scope of his instructions 
as teacher and preacher ; and contains the roll of 
the large number whom by his voice and hand he 
welcomed into the church of Christ, every name 
written in that always beautiful handwriting, which 
here embodies each syllable and letter with a lov- 
ing care, and nicety, that seems almost to speak of 
the minute knowledge and personal regard which 
each shared ; fit symbol of that inward register 
which preserved indelibly the names, faces, per- 
sonality, and heart's secrets of joy or sorrow, of all 
these and many more. He knew, not by effort, but 
because of his individual interest the register of 
his church literally by heart. 

There is no end to the testimonies of those who 
only learn the more as the lapse of time parts them 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxvii 

from him, how much they are indebted to him 
for the blessing of sorrows comforted, or of faith 
found, recovered, or deepened and enlarged. " To 
those in trouble of any kind he was tenderly sym- 
pathetic and thoughtful, and was always more than 
glad to have inquiring, even doubting ones come to 
him for advice and assistance, and with such he 
had a happy faculty of clearing away the doubts, 
not so much by opposing arguments as by quietly 
and tactfully leading the thought to truths to 
which they could consent. In this way many a 
young man just on the verge of slipping away into 
the darkness of doubt or skepticism itself, or into 
indifference, was saved to a life of useful, earnest 
service of God." 

In a wider way, by his simple personal charac- 
ter, and the unconscious lifting of others by a pure, 
gracious, unselfish life, he was a constant inspira- 
tion in the community. Charming in conversation, 
a good listener as well as talker, quick in catching 
the humorous side of conversation, full of fun as 
well as scholarly and instructive, wholly above re- 
proach in motive and in act, he won all hearts to 
him by his tender, loving charity, and his quick 
appreciation of the best to be found in all he met." 

After all, his pulpit was the focus to which all 
his labors converged, from which his influence 
radiated. " Always earnest and impressive, he 



xxviii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

was at times most eloquent, expressing largest, 
deepest truths in choicest language. He never 
failed to be instructive and inspiring, so honest 
and true to his own ideals ; so spiritual and with 
such a sweet loving spirit, absolutely sinking all 
thought of self in his treatment of any sacred 
theme. His first aim — his constant aim in all his 
public efforts — was to be real in all he said from 
the pulpit, and so he was never betrayed into say- 
ing anything under the excitement of the occasion, 
or for the sake of effect, or which had not pre- 
viously become a very part of his own honest 
thought and belief. This won him the lasting re- 
spect and esteem of his people, and gave all that 
he said great weight and power. The growth in 
Christian life under his preaching was, as he would 
have had it, largely unconscious of its source, even 
with those most affected by it. Yet it was none 
the less real, steady, and abiding. Many were 
gradually led to a larger conception of Christian 
truth and life, and more close, living, personal re- 
lations to Christ himself, through his ministry, who 
could not perhaps recall the particular sermons 
from which influences for good had come to them." 

The prime defect of this memorial, bitterly re- 
gretted by its editors, as it will be by former hearers 
of Mr. Pease, is that it contains not even one fair 
example of what more than all else together was 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxix 

the work and achievement of his life, — his sermons. 
They live in delightful memories, better still in the 
substance of the character and faith of many listen- 
ers, but to eye and ear they are lost beyond recall. 
The two herein printed are but waifs, broken and 
battered, that have drifted by chance currents to 
hand. They are reconstructed from incomplete 
shorthand notes, and the second of them lacks even 
the benefit of the author's revision. The poems 
too, it must be remembered, were as a rule not 
prepared by the writer for publication. The Essay 
on Dante needs, indeed, no apology. It should not, 
however, be understood to represent the author's 
powers of thought or expression at their best, for, 
though it bears a recent date, it was the slow de- 
velopment and late revision of a theme the lines 
of which were fixed by an effort of his immature 
powers. 

This volume as a whole is a memorial of the 
mind and art of one who was resolutely withhold- 
ing himself from work for publication until the 
full time of harvest should come. He had no 
sooner put in the sickle than it dropped from his 
hand. The small handful of precious first-fruits, 
in the opening address and lectures, best tell us 
what the harvest would have been. 

In May, 1893, he received, and in June accepted, 
a call to become Bartlet Professor of Sacred Rhe- 



XXX BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



toric and Lecturer on Pastoral Theology in An- 
dover Theological Seminary. He formally closed 
his pastorate in Maiden, with a farewell sermon, 
September 3. He had already moved to Andover, 
and begun, without any interval of rest, the prep- 
aration of his Inaugural Address. This was de- 
livered September 20, in the presence of an as- 
sembly, which filled to its utmost capacity the 
Seminary chapel, and was made significant by the 
presence of representatives from near and far of 
his brethren in the ministry, with whose general 
approval and acclaim he had been called to his 
chair. This done, he turned at once with ardor 
and growing zest to the duties of his professorship, 
giving his time mostly to the preparation of his 
course in Homiletics, of which he had drawn out 
a complete scheme, and fully prepared five intro- 
ductory lectures. As he speedily came to the deci- 
sion to adopt the same free method in their deliv- 
ery that he used in preaching, he wrote out only 
the first two, and hence these alone, though not 
surpassing the rest in interest and value, are avail- 
able for publication. 

Over these closing weeks, full of enthusiasm and 
activity, slowly crept the deepening shadow of a 
strange physical lassitude, which his friends ac- 
counted for by the loss of his wonted summer's 
rest, and the excessive mental and emotional strains 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. xxxi 



he had been under ; but its insidious cause duly 
appeared in a fever, which proved to be typhoid, 
and after three weary weeks, happily free from 
severe pain, terminated his life. 

His mind w^as quite clear at the last, and he 
knew well that he was near his "passing." He 
looked back with humble, earnest gratitude, be- 
cause ''he had been permitted for thirteen years 
to be a minister of the Lord Jesus ; " onward, with 
confident hope that he should soon meet this same 
dear Lord, and friends gone before, among them 
his own mother, of whom he had no memory, only 
all his life a longing for, and the one who had so 
truly taken a mother's place to him, and of whom 
we have seen dutiful mention in his class record. 
To friends he was leaving on earth, he sent his 
love, mentioning them singly and in groups, and in 
particular to " every member of the church in 
West Lebanon, and of the church in Maiden." 
To all, in whatever degree of nearness they stood 
to him, to wife, to son, to father, and sisters, to his 
students, fellow-professors, fellow-ministers, to the 
churches he had served, he left in some form the 
same message : '' Tell them, when one comes here, 
where I am there seems only one thing worth liv 
ing for, — to love and to serve the Lord Jesus." 
With such words were filled the last hours of a 
beautiful Lord's day afternoon, and towards the 



xxxii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, 

dawn of the next morning, November 20, 1893, lie 
was given the answer of his prayer, audibly ut- 
tered, " Let me go, for the day breaketh." 

To friends in a wider circle, all unforewarned, 
the news of this sudden departure brought a pain- 
ful revulsion of their feelings of pleasure in his 
promotion, joy in his first triumph, and boundless 
hopes of his career, and left them bewildered by 
the startling and mysterious stroke. One group of 
these, which had gradually clustered about the per- 
sonality of Mr. Pease, with whom he had been, the 
guest and hero of their gathering, only the day 
before his prostration by illness, when they met 
after his death found a voice for their emotions in 
the few verses read by one of their number. They 
stand at the front of this volume, in some measure, 
perchance, to speak the thoughts of many hearts. 

It was wonderful how soon the gloom above the 
enigma of this heavy grief and loss broke and 
lifted before the shining of a holy life, and the 
light of the truths in which it had been lived, of 
which it still spoke. The Seminary chapel, where 
he had so lately given his inaugural, was filled 
with the sound of hymns of cheer and hope that 
he loved, and a simple ritual of Scripture and 
prayer. About him were gathered, as before, a 
great assembly, returning to share the joy of a 
loftier triumph with one who had again been called 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH xxxiii 

to "come up higher," and "wear a truer crown 
than any wreath that man can weave him." 

Only a few steps back of this chapel and the line 
of Seminary buildings lies the burial ground which 
has received to its bosom already a worthy succes- 
sion of godly and scholarly men. It is merely a 
small and plain square of land, untouched by any 
futile efforts of man's art to adorn it, but beauti- 
fied alone by encircling hills and woods, by the 
glories of a noble prospect, and by the consecra- 
tion of much precious dust. It was our friend's 
wish that he might finish his work on this hill, and 
here on its slope might lie when it was done. Here 
his four little children, who had lived but a few 
weeks in the home in Maiden, were brought to lie 
at his feet. Hither the students of his class, who 
had begun already to love him as a friend, and 
were counting on him as their master, bore his 
body, and here in such sweet and honorable com- 
panionship we laid him down, while his own life, 
and his last message to us each, seemed to blend 
in our hearts with the prayer we heard over the 
grave. 

..." We bless and praise Thy holy name for 
all Thy servants departed this life in Thy faith and 
fear, and especially for those most dear to us, of 
whom we have good hope that they have fallen 
asleep in Jesus. And we beseech Thee to give us 



xxxiv BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 

grace to follow their good examples, that even here 
we may be united to them in fellowship of spirit, 
and that finally we may be gathered together with 
them into the bosom of Thy love : through Jesus 
Christ our Lord." 

C. L. N. 



THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 

ITS PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION, 
AND OTHER WRITINGS. 



THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



ITS PRESENT CLABI x^ND ATTRACTION.i 

It is quietly assumed in many quarters that the 
special charm of the Christian ministry is broken ; 
that the distinctive attraction of this field of labor 
is in large measure irretrievably lost. Robbed of 
the position and prestige it once held in the intel- 
lectual no less than in the moral and spiritual 
sphere, the ministry, it is said, can no longer urge 
the claims or present the opportunities of other 
days, — not merely of the ages past, but even of 
forty or fifty years ago. In the changes that have 
passed over modern life, older rivals have gained 
a precedence before denied, and new rivals have 
arisen to dispute the prize. To these changes, it 
is added, the ministry must resign itself, with such 
grace as it may, begin to take a lower room, and, 
as a consequence, be content with the service of 
inferior men. In a word, though the ministry will 
doubtless long survive, — for our generation has 
learned that nothing dies at once, — it will survive 
in a state of mild decadence, a lingering autumn 
which delays but cannot turn aside the killing 

^ An Inaugural Address delivered at Andover Theological 
Seminary, 20 September, 1893. 



2 



THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



frost; while the higher, spiritual uses it once 
served will be gradually taken up and absorbed by 
other callings, which in turn will draw away the 
energies of active, earnest, and thoughtful minds. 

All this, it is true, is seldom put in words : it 
is assumed, far oftener than asserted. Hence, to 
many of my hearers, so plain and blunt a state- 
ment as this may seem improbable and overdrawn. 
And, in the close and sheltered circles in which 
some minds still move, even the suggestion here 
clothed in words may sound unnatural, almost 
blasphemous, indeed. Yet it needs but little ac- 
quaintance with the world of to-day, whether we 
touch in person its busy, widening life, or catch 
its manifold reflection as mirrored in literature, to 
discover how common this quiet assumption has 
grown to be. It meets us in the novel, the ro- 
mance, the lighter essay. It colors the graver dis- 
cussion of scientific, ethical, and social problems. 
It gives a tone, a hue, an air, to magazines and 
reviews ; the daily prints are tinctured with it. It 
lurks below the language of men of science, of 
business, of society, of the world : it affects their 
bearing toward the minister with easy tolerance 
or light disdain: it shades and shapes their advice 
to young men who pause before they choose their 
calling. 

Sometimes, however, this assumption comes to 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION 3 



the surface, and finds direct expression, — is laid 
down, indeed, as a maxim beyond dispute. Ten 
years ago, an English scholar, himself a preacher, 
published an essay on " The Decay of Modern 
Preaching," ^ in which the fact of such decay was 
plainly accepted, remedies were hardly suggested, 
and the causes alone were considered a subject for 
discussion. Within the last few weeks, however, 
the assertion has been made in still clearer terms 
by a newspaper of exceptional intelligence and 
independence. With an air of easy omniscience 
tempered by condescension, the editor writes as 
follows : " This socialistic preaching is to be de- 
plored, because it weakens the already relaxed hold 
of the clergy upon educated men. The church, of 
course, no longer attracts the ablest of our college 
graduates as of old, but it is quite possible for 
men of moderate intellectual gifts to influence 
their hearers, if they will follow the methods and 
precepts of their Leader." And again, in the 
same article : " The proportion of educated men 
who refuse altogether to listen to sermons is con- 
siderable, and the average attendance of such men 
at church seems to be diminishing. Many still 
attend the established services from motives of de- 
corum : but if their pastors could look through the 
grave and respectful expressions that mask their 
1 J. H. Mahaffy, The Decay of Modern Preaching. 1882. 



4 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



thoughts, and see the emotions of pity for intel- 
lectual feebleness and contempt for ignorance 
which are held in restraint, they might learn that 
their only strength lies in the possession and the 
proclamation of humility and charity." ^ Humility 
and charity are an edifying lesson indeed, and a 
lesson it is always timely to learn, whether the 
example of the teacher confirms his precept or not. 
But the chief burden of this concio ad cleriim is 
precisely this assumption before us. Within the 
narrowed province which bounds its present influ- 
ence, the writer more than hints, the ministry can 
no longer claim the service of minds of the first 
order, but must expect to see them draw^n into 
wider and more promising fields, thus leaving at 
best only second-rate men to become the preachers 
and pastors of to-morrow. 

Now, minds of the first order are not common 
in any age or in any calling in life, and it is 
by "men of moderate intellectual gifts" that the 
world's work is mainly done. I have no desire, 
however, to discuss the personnel of the differ- 
ent professions, and comparisons are proverbially 
odious. Still less have I any fear with regard to 
the permanent place and work of the Christian 
ministry, established as it is on the same divine 

1 The Nation, May 25, 1893, Editorial ou "Christian 
Socialism." 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 5 



foundations with the Christian church, and with 
Christianity itself. But it seems to me not unfit- 
ting, on the threshold of the new work to which 
I have been called, and in contrast to the quiet 
assumption already noticed, to dwell upon the dis- 
tinctive claims and attractions of the ministry to- 
day. New emphasis certainly should be laid, not 
indeed upon what remains of earlier interest and 
influence after all deductions have been made, but 
rather upon the special claim and charm which 
grow out of the present, which have accrued to 
preacher and pastor alike from the very changes 
through which we have passed. For when once 
the needs, the demands, and the difficulties of our 
age are fairly understood, the Christian ministry, 
I am con^dnced, offers a richer opportunity and 
makes a stronger appeal than ever before to the 
largest and best disciplined intelligence, no less 
than to the heart that seeks the highest service of 
mankind. 

With the duties of the pastorate fresh in 
memory, and more familiar than the duties of this 
chair, I shall speak now as a preacher, not as a 
teacher. But those wdio are preparing to become 
ministers of the AVord, beside the special know- 
ledge and training amply provided here, need also 
the inspiration that comes from a broad view of 
their great charge, if the man of God is to be com- 



6 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



plete, furnished completely unto every good work. 
And if the duties and demands of their calling 
enlarge upon the view, let them remember that 
the charm of the vision widens with the horizon, 
and the promise and presence of the Master are 
broad and near to cover every need. 

What, then, is the distinctive attraction, the 
peculiar charm, of the ministry to-day? What 
features does this calling now present which make 
up for any apparent advantages it has lost, and by 
which, even more than in other days, it appeals to 
the highest powers, as it calls forth and rewards 
the largest effort and devotion ? And how are this 
claim and charm related to the charm and claim of 
other departments of thought and interest ? These 
questions will mark the direction to which our at- 
tention must now be turned. 

If there is one outstanding peculiarity in the in- 
tellectual effort of to-day, one feature upon which 
the finger may safely be put as distinctive, it is 
this : an intense feeling for movement, progress, 
growth, life. It is this which within one crowded 
century has revolutionized the sciences of the j)ast 
and called new sciences into being. This is the 
new spirit of which men speak. It is this pro- 
found sense of the subtle, unbroken relations that 
bind all forms of life together, individual and 
social, past, present, and future, which has made 



PRESEXT CLAIM AXD ATTRACTIOX. 7 



men impatient of all partial, narrow, isolated in- 
terpretations of facts and phenomena, and distrust- 
ful of all theories that claim completeness, where 
ignorance is veiled under specious assumptions of 
omniscience. Method, no less than matter, has 
been transformed by this spirit. The ambitious 
systems of the past, with the dogmatism of be- 
liever and skeptic alike, of Rousseau and Voltaire 
no less than of Aquinas and Calvin, have given 
place to more modest hypotheses, held below the 
fact, not above it, with conscious and confessed 
limitations of ignorance and partial view, ready to 
be revised or superseded whenever some larger 
truth or some plainer fact shall come to light. 
This sense, this method, and this spirit we find 
at work everywhere. Although most apparent at 
first among the interpreters of life in nature and 
life in man, even the sciences of inert matter and 
mechanical movement have shared their influence. 
Under this impulse, indeed, matter is no longer 
inert, and movement no more mechanical. As- 
tronomy, geology, and physics have felt the change. 

Within the last quarter of a century," writes 
Camille Flammarion, our sublime science has 
been wholly transformed. Instead of watching 
inert masses in motion through the void of space, 
the study of the universe as related to the physical 
constitution of the different worlds, the evolution 



8 



THE CHRISTIAN 



MINISTRY: 



of the stars and of life, has taken its place." ^ 
Forces once supposed to be latent or lost, geology- 
discovers still at work, and allows no break to 
separate the present from the past. It is hardly 
necessary to dwell on the new conception of or- 
ganic life from its humblest origin to its highest 
reach. Evolution is the keynote to all our thought ; 
and, however the word may be limited or defined, 
three great truths are firmly established : first, a 
close, continuous, mutual relation exists between 
all forms and parts of the visible universe ; second, 
no unpeopled void is found between worm and 
man, between star and soul ; and, third, as a con- 
sequence, no object can be too remote, and no form 
of life too lowly, to claim our interest. The years 
of patient observation which Darwin gave to the 
earth-worm and Sir John Lubbock to the ant teach 
us that no creature that has shared the Creator's 
thought and touch is unworthy of our prolonged 
and reverent study. The higher the forms and the 
more varied the phases life affords, the more in- 
tense our human interest becomes. Man is not 
forgotten in this all-embracing passion and re- 
search. His individual life and thought, from the 
lowest savage to the sage and saint, have been 
traced with unwearied pains. His societies, his 
civilizations, have been patiently studied in their 
^ North American Review, January, 1890. 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 9 



crudest as well as their highest forms, in rock and 
monument and in surviving fault and strata, at 
cost of sacrifice worthy of the martyrs of the faith. 
The inscriptions of Assyria, dumb for long cen- 
turies, speak again to the ear and through the lips 
of a Rawlinson, and the mummied monarchs of 
Egypt leave their sepulchred pomp and silence to 
become the familiars, almost the household friends, 
of a Mariette. Thus history is clothed with life, 
and the prehistoric past is made to breathe and 
move once more. The same great change trans- 
forms the world in which we live. The jDcoples of 
the present, remote and hostile before, begin by 
closer contact and better mutual understanding to 
realize their kinship. The curse of Babel is re- 
versed, and the miracle of Pentecost renewed, 
when long isolated languages are brought together 
and recognized as hardly more than dialects of a 
common speech. Literature, refusing the narrow 
bounds of the classic, becomes cosmopolite, and 
welcomes all genuine treasure, whatever be its 
source. A hundred myths and legends melt in 
one, and under the most grotesque exterior we feel 
through all religions the need, the aspiration, and 
the soul of man. 

How much the material progress of our age, its 
marvelous inventions, its multiplied facilities, must 
count as factors in this result, we cannot fail to 



10 



THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



own. But it is the intellectual movement with 
which we have to deal, and through all of this the 
sense of life with its progress and continuity is 
evident and distinctive. 

It is not claimed, of course, that this sense of 
life has been born out of nothing, or absolutely 
created, in a single age. This spirit has always 
been present in the world, disputing its place with 
a coarser, mechanical conception. Within narrow 
limits, and in separate realms of thought, it has 
made the glory of every creative age, as in letters 
at the Renaissance, or in religion at the Reforma- 
tion. But in all these ages, barriers were inter- 
posed, the spirit at work in one sphere did not 
extend to another, inert matter and lifeless mech- 
anism maintained their ground. To-day, for the 
first time, the feeling is for life everywhere, for 
life with its unbroken continuity and progress, for 
life infinitely varied and manifold, yet forever 
one. It is one universal, living force, which, we 
have discovered in a truer sense than the poet 
dreamed, 

" Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, 
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees ; 
Lives through all life, extends through all extent, 
Spreads undivided, operates unspent." ^ 

What, then, is the relation of the Christian 
1 Alexander Pope, Essay on Man. 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION, 11 



ministry to this mighty and far-reaching change ? 
How far has it been caught up and borne on by 
this current of new life ? Has it felt a stronger 
impulse, found a larger mission, brought a new- 
message for to-day ? On the answer to these ques- 
tions our whole discussion turns. No isolation of 
interest and influence is possible. If the ministry 
enters into this universal movement, if it is sen- 
sitive to this far-reaching change, it will share in 
the results, and find in these a fresh attraction 
for thoughtful minds. If the ministry stands un- 
changed, while all else moves onward, its former 
charm may well be broken, for it has lost the 
prophetic spirit. Like the prophets of old, the 
preacher must speak from life, through life, and 
unto life, if his message is to be heard and heeded. 

Considered in its ideal, no calling touches hu- 
man life at so many points as the Christian min- 
istry. None, therefore, should feel the change on 
which we have dwelt so widely, none should profit 
more by its results. And none should find the 
present time a more inspiring field for service. 
The spirit of the age both quickens the preacher's 
pulse and appeals to him for his message. To 
bear witness to the presence of an unseen life, 
above, below, around our finite lives, has always 
been his office, to make men feel that life has been 
his triumph ; when this witness has grown cold. 



12 



THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



formal, and mechanical, Lis state has suffered 
decadence and eclipse. To-day, like St. Paul on 
Mars' Hill, he finds his teaching attuned to the 
deepest thought of his age. Our poetry, in accents 
now pensive, now profound, cries through the lips 
of Egypt's king : — 

If tliou be He that made the earth aud skies, 
To thine own creature come without disguise. 
Long have I blindly groped around thy throne, 
But the sense sees not what the heart has known. 
I strain for thee, I gaze with eager nerves. 
But my glance backward to my eyeballs curves ; 
To meet thine arms my arms I fling abroad ; 
My arms fold on me, vacant of the God. 
Upon the dark I paint thy secret face, 
But night holds nothing in her hollow space. 
Dost thou not see my tears, not hear my cry ? 
I cannot see nor hear, yet know thee nigh. 
I feel thee in the dust-wreaths of the plain, 
And in the rare, quick drops of sacred rain : 
I seek thee round the corners of the rocks, 
Or on the riverain pasture of the flocks ; 
And thou art there, but art not there for me : — 
Take all the world, all else I yield to thee : 
But I must see the God before I die." ^ 

Our philosophy still worships an Unknown God, 
but dares to think over his thoughts, and even di- 
vine his attributes of intelligence and power. Our 
science begins to look through phenomena and 
1 Francis Turner Palgrave, AmenopJiis. 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 13 



ask for mind, and utters these significant words, 
first spoken two years ago witkin these very walls 
by a master of unquestioned authority : " In the 
study of the successions exhibited by animals 
and plants, it has been perceived that the march 
of events from the primitive simplicity towards 
greater and greater complication, culminating in 
man, requires us to assume the existence of some- 
thing like permanent guiding influences operating 
in the world of matter." ^ 

In France, always sensitive as a barometer to 
anticipate changes in the atmosphere of thought, 
the need of " permanent guiding influences " in 
the moral universe is also felt, and the direction 
toward w^hich men must look to find them is 
plainly hinted. Saul also is found among the 
prophets, when Eenan foresees the possible return 
of the world, wearied with the successive bank- 
ruptcies of liberalism, to the Jehovah of the He- 
brews. And Darmesteter, a savant of the younger 
school, finds in the teaching of the prophets the 
only hope for his own generation, borrowing the 
prophecy of Amos, Behold the days come, saith 
the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the 
land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, 
but of hearing the words of the Lord," ^ and 

^ N. S. Shaler, The Interpretation of Nature, p. 4G. 
2 Amos viii. 11-13. 



14 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



pointing to his own land for its fulfillment : " And 
to-day also the fair virgins and young men look in 
vain from one sea to the other ; from no rock 
bursts the spring which shall quench the thirst of 
the soul ; the divine word is not in Ibsen, and it 
is not in Tolstoi even, and neither from the North 
nor from the East cometh the light." ^ These 
three voices, of poet, man of science, and critic, 
are not isolated and unique ; typical are they 
rather, and representative ; they speak the temper 
of the time ; they breathe the feeling of multi- 
tudes of men and women all around us, unfamil- 
iar with discovery or research, yet touched and 
troubled by this atmosphere of unrest, with no 
firm hold on the certainties of the unseen, but 
conscious that the things which can be seen and 
weighed and measured can never feed the hunger 
of the heart. In such an age, the need for min- 
istry has surely not been outgrown : was it ever 
greater than now ? " From my earliest childhood," 
a physician once said to me, " I can never remem- 
ber a time when the sight of physical pain did not 

^ J. D<armesteter, Les Prophetes d'lsrael, iv. " Et au- 
jourd'hui aussi les belles filles et les jeunes gens regardent 
en vain d'une mer k I'autre ; de nul rocher ne jaillit la 
source ou ^tancher la soif de Tame : la parole divine n'est 
point dans Ibsen et elle n'est point dans Tolstoi meme, et ni 
du Nord ni du Levant ne vient la lumi^re." 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION 15 



call out in me the instant impulse and effort to 
relieve it." No diploma from the schools could 
have conferred on him a better title to practice 
medicine; no emolument of fame or money could 
equal the charm he found in his profession. In 
the presence of spiritual suffering, the minister of 
Christ must feel a kindred impulse : with this im- 
pulse in his heart, he may hear his Master's call 
in the half unconscious need and longing of his 
fellow-men, and, never more truly than to-day, 
may enter through the service and relief of his 
brethren into the very joy of his Lord. " My 
idea of heaven," said Tennyson, "is to be engaged 
in perpetual ministry to souls in this and other 
worlds." ^ And the saintly hero of whom Whittier 
sings, served troubled souls around him, and found 
in that service the highest blessing : — 

He forgot his own soul for others, 

Himself to his neighbor lending : 
He found his Lord in his suffering brothers, 

And not in the clouds descending." ^ 

But impulse alone, however unselfish, is not 
enough for service. Effort must be trained and di- 
rected, to become effective ; sympathy must be broad- 
ened and made intelligent, before it can give relief. 

^ Quoted from conversation, by Agnes Grace Weld, in the 
Contemporary Review, March, 1893. 
- John G. Whittier, G. L. S. 



16 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 

The preacher must know the truth he brings and 
the times he serves. The pastor must study 
closely society around him, as well as the individual 
hearts to whom he is called to minister. The 
changes of our age have been felt in all these 
directions : in them all, the new conditions and the 
new spirit must be recognized and understood. 
The problems to be met are more varied and com- 
plex than those of old. But the higher life rises 
in its level, the more complex it grows of neces- 
sity, and the more varied it becomes, the greater 
the charm of study and service. The play of 
changeful circumstance across a background calm 
and unchanging delights the eye and the mind. It 
is the charm of the mountain in its eternal pa- 
tience, touched to new meanings by moving masses 
of shadow ; of the sea, forever tranquil below the 
restless tossing of the waves ; of the sky in its 
pure untroubled depths of blue, far above the pass- 
ing clouds of gold and amber. It is the charm of 
the highest poetry from JEschylus to Shakespeare, 
of the unshaken mind of Prometheus in contrast 
with the turbid wrath of Zeus and the trembling 
terror of his creatures ; of the calm constancy of 
Cordelia and the white purity of Desdemona amid 
the very torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of passion 
all around them. Realized in its deeper meaning, 
it has been the strength of prophets and martyrs 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION, 17 



and apostles, who, through the things that could be 
seen and shaken, held fast to the things unseen and 
unchanging. And through all the changes of to- 
day, the charm and strength alike are his who, 
while others cling to broken spars of scattered 
truths, rests firmly on that Providence which 
shapes and guides the course of men and ages by 
ways unsearchable but sure, — 

" That God, which ever lives and loves. 
One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event, 
To which the whole creation moves." ^ 

With this spirit and confidence, we turn to study 
more closely the effects produced by the changed 
conceptions and conditions of to-day in the several 
directions already indicated : first, in the meaning 
and interpretation of the minister's message ; 
second, upon the society to which he speaks ; and 
third, in the individual lives entrusted to his 
special care. In each direction, if his task has 
become more difficult and complex, the attraction 
is also doubled, while the sense of life with its con- 
tinuity and its progress, ever varied yet forever 
one, has grown larger, deeper, and more absorb- 
ing. 

I. The source of his message claims our first 

2 Alfred Temiyson, In Memoriam, last stanza. 
2 



18 



THE CHRIS TI AX MINISTRY. 



attention. The preacher is always the minister 
of the Word, and the Scriptures remain the chan- 
nel of the divine message. But there is a wide 
difference between the ways in which men have 
regarded and used the Scriptures. The humble 
soul indeed has always found here the hidden 
manna. The great preachers, preachers who have 
moved men's hearts as the trees of the wood are 
moved with the wind, have never failed to draw 
their fire and energy from this source. These 
results have been possible under interpretations, 
crude and literal on the one hand, wild and vi- 
sionary on the other. They prove the power of 
the Spirit through all the hindrance of the flesh. 
Patristic allegory, mediaeval myth and legend, the 
mystic's glowing imagination, the hard prosaic 
system of the literalist, — not one, nor all, of these 
could always dim the heavenly light. But while 
we recognize the Pro\'idence that overruled human 
folly, we find therein no sanction for these false 
and forced interpretations of the TTord. 

The great, creative ages in the Church rose to 
larger views of the Scriptures, and caught glimpses 
of the richly varied wisdom they reveal. But the 
mechanism of dogma, or the fanciful search for 
symbols, soon closed in and hindered the influence 
of the freer conception. To-day the revolution 
throughout all realms of thought has transformed 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION, 19 



the study of the Bible also. Mechanical concep- 
tions, the absurdities o£ symbolism, have gone, to 
return no more. The new method affects even 
those who least accept the critical result. That 
method of thinking you cannot escape, if you think 
at all. And the distinctive feature of this new 
conception of Scripture is the same which was 
pointed out before, the sense of life, in all its 
wonderful variety and movement, throughout the 
whole. Luther discovered that Paul's words were 
living things, with hands and feet. We have 
found that every Scripture, — 

" If cut deep down the middle, 
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.'' ^ 

The special questions of criticism it does not fall 
within my province to discuss. They must be left 
to competent hands. They do not belong to the 
preacher's sphere. They demand a combination of 
time, talents, and patient trailing which he cannot 
give. Hasty verdicts in this department by men 
of good intentions, but deficient in modesty and 
judgment, are as unfortunate as verdicts of kin- 
dred character and origin upon strictly scientific 
questions. A common training in theology, and a 
reader's familiarity with the languages in which 
the Bible was written, enable the preacher to fol- 
1 Mrs. Browning, Lady Geraldine^s Courtship, 



20 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



low the general trend of criticism with intelligence 
and advantage, but no more entitle him to pro- 
nounce upon difficult and disputed points than the 
physician's license and practice make him a com- 
petent judge in the special questions of biology. 
But the preacher's great message will not grow less 
clear, strong, and imperative as he faces new inter- 
pretations of the Scriptures. And if he follows 
carefully the advance of enlightened and reverent 
scholarship, he wdll welcome the largest, freest 
investigation, waiting with patience the slow re- 
sults of years, very confident that the treasure is 
not less heavenly because the vessels are earthen, 
and that here also the Lord hath more truth and 
light yet to break forth out of his holy Word. 

But there are special ways in which this changed 
conception of the Scriptures and their organic life 
must wdden and vitalize the preacher's use of the 
AVord, and enlarge the interest and power of his 
ministry. Of these effects, some are negative, 
some positive. 

A higher regard for the original meaning and 
relation of each separate Scripture is a first evident 
advantage to the preacher. The fantastic treat- 
ment of the Bible by the pulpit of other days, 
sometimes, alas ! in our own, is familiar to all. 
Like the Master's raiment in the hands of the 
Roman soldiery, the sacred vesture of Scripture 



PBESEXT CLAIM AXD ATTRACTIOy. '21 



has been rent asunder and the division made by 
lot. If these irreverent extremes have been rare, 
how often passages have been used vrith little care 
for their first sense and connection I Texts, torn 
from the woven fabric, have been held up in 
shreds and patches : words, robbed of their right- 
ful meaning, forced to yield sti^ange, unnatural 
senses, by trick of translation or outward resem- 
blance. I need hardly allude to further distortion 
by which the plainest passages were turned to 
mysticism or metaphysics. All this is ^Dossible. 
while Scripture is regarded as mechanism or dead 
anatomy. All this becomes impossible, when Scrip- 
ture is felt to be informed with full, pervading, 
breathing life. 

The preacher who feels this life informing all 
the Scriptures will shrink from the plain irrever- 
ence of all careless vi^-isection. His texts will not 
be isolated, nor their natural meaning strained. 
Neither indolence nor timidity will tempt him to 
take up current mistranslations or renderings mis- 
applied. His Bible will never become an armory 
of weapons for controversy, nor a cpiarry whence 
stones may be cut to buttress mediaeval or modern 
theories. He will not overlook the broad sweep 
of Revelation, on the one hand ; he will not force 
one doubtful passage on the other, — not even to 
save the consistency of the whole. Open and 



22 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



sensitive to changing light, his errors may be 
outgrown, and his truths will never become stereo- 
tyj^ed in lifeless formulas. 

Each several Scripture will thus have an indi- 
vidual teaching, and, as a second advantage, the 
preacher's message will gain in variety, in point, 
in force. The dullness of mere repetition is a 
besetting temptation of the pulpit. When the 
Bible is only a book of texts, all equally available 
at every turn, the narrowness of the preacher's 
mind and experience becomes the measure and 
limit of his teaching. The same meagre round of 
truth and duty, ^dewed in the same familiar light, 
cast in the same monotonous forms, will make up 
his weekly burden. Each mind is only a pool, 
stagnant and unwholesome, unless its life is con- 
stantly renewed by currents from without. How 
changed, then, the preacher's message becomes, 
when at every point he touches the varied life of 
Scripture ! Each scene, each character, each ut- 
terance, has a meaning of its o\\ti, the common 
truths take individual color and force, and the 
whole range of his teaching is widened. It was 
his faithful study of rock and brook, with the 
humblest wild flower on the edge of each, that lent 
varied grace to Sir Walter Scott's descriptions. 
He who follows Nature closely makes her lavish 
wealth in some measure his own. And he who 



PRESENT CLAIM AXD ATTRACTION. 23 



draws from each Scripture its individual lesson 
will never become the slave of dullness and repe- 
tition. 

Beyond the enrichment of each several inter- 
pretation, the new sense of life and power flowing 
thi'ough all Revelation counts as a blessing to the 
preacher. Inspiration itself he cannot conceive 
as confined within an artificial reservoir, motionless 
through all time, unchanged in form, in depth, in 
level ; he views it as a river, rather, with widening, 
deepening course from source to sea : he feels its 
presence as a divine life, mingling with the currents 
of human life, revealed through individual and 
national history, with ever growing depth and 
clearness. AVith such a vision, dogmatic losses, if 
losses they be, are transmuted into higher gain. 
The power of Revelation the preacher finds not 
static but dynamic, not mechanical but vital. It 
comes from life, it flows through life ; the life of 
a chosen race under the old dispensation, the life 
of a widening church under the new ; the individ- 
ual life of prophet and apostle under both. And 
in the blending of di^^ne and human at every 
stage, neither element is lost or lessened : both 
become broader and deeper with each further un- 
folding, until the heart turns to the Spirit through 
all Scripture as the most devout of our poets turns 
to the Word Incarnate : — 



24 



THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



" Deep strike thy roots, O heavenly Vine, 
Withm our earthly sod, 
Most human and yet most divine. 
The flower of man and God/' ^ 

Both the larger life of race and church and the 
individual life of prophet and apostle have become 
more human, more real, and thus are brought into 
closer relation to other life, to our own lives. The 
sacred story, no longer isolated, but subject like 
other history to change and growth, becomes more 
truly a lesson for the world. Around tbe name of 
the great Lawgiver, the Law of Israel grows by 
successive layers and accretions, like the codes of 
Rome or England. Beneath the shadow of Solo- 
mon, the proverbs which a nation's wisdom has 
coined through generations from many dies are 
gathered in one golden treasury. Through the 
Psalter, set first in tune to David's harp, but richer 
and more varied in tone than any individual life, 
the Jewish Church pours forth her strains of 
changing experience through ages of sorrow, exile, 
exultation, sweeps the wide gamut of religious feel- 
ing, and blends in her eternal song the sigh of each 
burdened heart with the aspiration of the whole 
church of God. 

The revelation through individual life, also, has 
become richer and more distinct. Each prophet 
1 John G. Whittier, Our Master, 



PRESENT CLAIM AXD ATTRACTIOy. 25 



stands in his own place and bears his own message : 
he is not a mouthpiece but a voice, not a pen but 
a person, a preacher of righteousness first to his 
age, and then to later ages. Even if his name is 
lost, we feel his heart and life : the second Isaiah 
is not less real a presence than the first. And 
from the broken sobs of Hosea and the scathing 
philippic of Amos to the richer personality of Jere- 
miah, sensitive, tender, passionate, each prophet's 
power is doubled when we feel the man below the 
message. Restored to their local setting, the Epis- 
tles of the Xew Testament are filled with life again : 
the needs of the readers become as real as the 
writer's heart. Through the Gospels even, uncon- 
scious touches betray the Evangelist, his personal 
feeling and his point of view. 

The Scriptures plainly grow more human under 
this changed conception : but, further, they become 
thereby not less but more divine. As the human 
life in prophet and apostle, in race and church, 
grows more real to the preacher's thought, and 
comes closer to his heart and life to-day, so the 
divine life through all is felt as richer and more 
real. Revelation through life is, of necessity, 
larger than Revelation through mechanism ; and 
the higher and more varied the life through which 
it flows, the deeper and richer Revelation itself be- 
comes. At every stage of the sacred story the 



26 



THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



Spirit, we feel, breathes upon the Word ; while in 
the movement, progress, life, making the whole 
organic, we find a larger revelation of divine, cre- 
ative thought. Whatever similarities are discov- 
ered between the earlier Scriptures and the records 
of other races, there can be no question of a higher 
purpose, a purer motive, moulding the common 
material. No prophetic message fails to disclose 
some clearer insight than before was given ; no 
psalm but mingles inspiration with aspiration. 
And from the first faint dawn of the Protevange- 
lium to the broad noonday of the Gospel, from the 
earliest strivings of the Spirit with man to the 
perfect man in Christ, is discerned, now dimly, 
now more clearly, that " one far-off divine event, 
to which" Revelation like the whole creation 
moves." 

Above all else, however, the distinct and abso- 
lute supremacy of the Master, in his Person and in 
his claim, is the largest gain the preacher finds in 
the changed conception of the Scriptures. Always 
recognized in theory of course, this supremacy has 
been sadly forgotten in fact. The Roman Church 
has put the Person of Peter in his Master's place : 
Protestanism has too often put the teaching of Paul 
before, if not above, his Master's word. Peter's 
language to Cornelius, " Stand up ; I myself also 
am a man," and Paul's indignant disclaimer at 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 27 



Lystra, " Sirs, wliy do ye these things ? We also 
are men of like passions with you," may teach us 
how both apostles would have refused this bor- 
rowed worship. But a higher voice has spoken : 
" One is your Master : and all ye," — Paul and 
Peter among the rest, — " all ye are brethren." 
From these temptations of the past, the preacher 
of to-day is free. He cannot longer bring the New 
Testament down to the level of the Old ; he cannot 
make Christ the Interpreter of Paul. The very 
limitation and finiteness of the human servant set 
off the higher glory of the divine, the only begotten 
Son. Reflected through different hearts and lives, 
the Person of the Master shines forth the more 
transcendent : contrasted with all broken lights 
before Him and after Him, with the divers por- 
tions and divers manners of prophetic revelation, 
TToXvjjLepojs Koi TToAvrpoTTO)?, or with the partial vision 
to which even Paul confessed, apn ytvwo-Kco e/c fxepovs, 
His teaching regains its rightful place and its 
unique authority. His supreme Revelation be- 
comes the crown and centre of the preacher's mes- 
sage. " Back to Christ " is the watchword for all 
interpretation of the past : Onward to Christ," 
the call of the Spirit for to-day. With this result 
secure, the changing cloud of criticism that over- 
shadows us may be dark or bright, we need not 
fear to enter it ; other voices may grow silent, other 



28 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



forms may fade, one Form will still remain, — One 
Voice will still speak from the cloud : " This is my 
beloved Son ; hear him." 

Such, then, is the source of the preacher's mes- 
sage to-day. Such is the living AVord he is sent 
to interpret to his age. The largest, profoundest 
learning he can command, he may well call to his 
aid. From other literatures and histories and 
faiths he may draw w^hatever lessons they can 
teach. He may welcome all new light of scholar- 
ship, discovery, research. But with a Scripture so 
varied and vital in every part, informed and knit 
together by one organic growing life, in the highest 
sense both human and divine, a hundred broken 
rays of one Eternal Light, he need not fear that 
his study will lose its interest, or his source of in- 
spiration be exhausted. 

II. A second broad direction in which the min- 
ister is affected by the changed conditions of to- 
day is in the sphere and local setting of his work. 
The community, society, the church, each of these 
three concentric circles that surround his life, 
shares the stir and restless movement of the age. 
Throughout our country, in New England as in 
the West, in village as in city, the changes the age 
has wrought, and the contrast with thirty years 
ago, are many and striking. These changes the 
preacher must take into account if he would adapt 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 29 



his message to present needs ; these new conditions 
will absorb the pastor's closest study and task his 
best intelligence. 

An English country parson of to-day, less quaint 
in flavor but more virile than his earlier name- 
sake, speaking for his brethren, counts the " abso- 
lute finahty " of their position its most cheerless 
and trying feature. " Dante's famous line," he 
writes, ought to be carved upon the lintel of 
every country parsonage in England. When the 
new rector on his induction takes the key of the 
church, locks himself in, and tolls the bell, it is his 
own passing bell that he is ringing." And again : 
" This boasted fixity of tenure is the w^eak point, 
not the strong one ; it is movement we want among 
us, not stagnation." ^ This fixity, this finality 
might have been found in many a New England 
parish fifty years ago ; how strange and remote 
these conditions seem to us to-day ! The frequent 
changes in modern pastorates are due in part no 
doubt to the unhappy restlessness of people and 
pastor ; in part, also, it must be admitted, they 
grow out of the larger and more varied demands 
now made upon the minister, exhausting his 
strength and necessitating relief through change 
of field. A pastorate of ten years brings more 

^ Augustus Jessopp, The Trials of a Country Parson, 
pp. 85, 94. 



30 



THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



of varied experience to the pastor now than a pas- 
torate of twenty years once brought. And even 
the nearest parishes differ so widely from one 
another to-day that every change involves the 
awakening of new interests and the careful study 
of new conditions and problems. 

While the pastorate remains the same, more- 
over, the parish undergoes a constant, all-pervad- 
ing change. Ten years mean more in the parish 
now than twenty years meant half a century ago. 
The whole complexion, the very atmosphere, of our 
social life a single generation has changed. In 
cities and large towns the difference is recognized 
at once : it is real, though less perceptible, in vil- 
lages also. The sleepiest hamlet, stagnant and 
duller to the stranger's eye 

" than the fat weed 
That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf/' ^ 

has not escaped untouched; the patient observer 
finds, the pastor feels, even there the pathos and 
the tragedy of hidden change. 

Twenty-five years ago, the typical New England 
village was homogeneous in character and simple 
in life. Hardly a foreigner could be found among 
a population born and bred in the same commu- 
nity, for the most part in the same houses. Di- 
versities there were, for our New England stock 
2 Shakespeare, Hamlet^ i. 5. 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION, 31 



has always been rich in original varieties, but the 
common types of character, the broad currents of 
habit, thought, and life remained unchanged al- 
most for generations. Neighbors in place were 
neighbors in fact, and the life of the village was 
like the life of a large and overgrown family. The 
church was easily the centre of social interest, and 
the Sunday meeting drew families together from 
scattered farms, the sole relief to the monotony 
and unvarying routine of daily life. How differ- 
ent the New England village of to-day! The 
homogeneous life, broken up within, has grown 
heterogeneous from without, almost cosmopolite 
indeed. The great tides of immigration, setting 
in for years from every part of Europe, and later 
from Asia also, have turned aside from the broad 
course of the West, overflowed the bounds of the 
city, and reached the larger villages ; while the 
less noticed influx from the provinces on our 
Northern border has been felt in smaller ham- 
lets and scattered farms. In outward aspect, in 
population, affected in her turn and measure like 
the other States, New England remains no more 
the staid, conservative, unchanging community of 
thirty years ago. 

Under this outward aspect, deeper and more 
vital differences are found. Industrial changes, 
added to the change of population, have modified 



82 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



our social customs, individual habits, ways of 
thought. The framework of society is subtly al- 
tered. Interests are isolated, men have grown 
apart: a common feeling is lost, mutual indiffer- 
ence succeeds, classes are strongly marked and 
separated. The simpler conditions of the past 
have gone ; relations grow strained, new social 
problems arise, ethical questions become multi- 
plied and complex. Differences in thought and 
life, growing out of differences of inheritance, 
birth, training, and association, are not lightly 
overcome. Men misunderstand one another, and 
a common standard is lost. 

Nor can these difficulties be studied in their 
local setting alone. The little world of the village 
opens by a hundred avenues into the larger world 
without. Intercourse is unbroken ; the daily paper 
carries the common thought, opinion, prejudice, 
to the farthest point, diffuses common intelligence 
and common ignorance, and makes all problems, 
all troubles, however local or distant in their be- 
ginnings, a burden to be borne by all. The tide 
of change reaches the remotest village with restless 
ebb and flow, and the mighty j)ulses of the great 
world's life are felt to-day in the lowliest hamlet. 

Under such conditions, what new significance is 
given to Wesley's motto, in whichever way the 
words are turned ! " My parish is the world," 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION, 33 

every pastor may say, as be reflects on all the di- 
verse elements that meet in the smallest commu- 
nity, and remembers from what distant quarters 
these elements have been drawn ! " The world is 
my parish," he may add, when he finds his peo- 
ple's thoughts and feelings affected by events so 
far away, and feels their lives dra\^Ti slowly but 
surely into the current of the great world's move- 
ment! Is stagnation necessary in such a pastor- 
ate ? Is it even possible ? 

But the pastor must be more than a passive ob- 
server, a curious and interested witness, in the 
midst of these shifting scenes ; he must be an 
actor on the stage. Nor is it enough, if his in- 
dividual part is taken well; he is called to give 
motive and harmony to the movement of others. 
Here is incentive to largest effort : here is room 
for the exercise of patience, the discipline of 
thought, sagacious and far-sighted. Has any age 
made more demands than this? 

The church cannot remain untouched by these 
changes all around her ; she must hear and heed 
the call of each new occasion. If her members 
grow lethargic, it is the pastor's task to awaken 
them, and set more clearly before their eyes the 
duties of to-day. In each community, along all 
lines of modern movement, in society, business, 
politics, the highest Christian principle, as already 
2 



34 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



understood, needs to be made effective and para- 
mount by the influence of an aroused, united 
cburch. Religious problems, also, more complex 
than in other days, demand for their solution 
larger intelligence and charity, sympathy and 
patience. The diverse elements in every church, 
all ages and all classes, must be not simply har- 
monized, but lifted into some broader union, knit 
together as members of one body by diverse yet 
mutual service. Organization, so potent a factor 
in all our work to-day, must be extended here and 
informed with life, until the church has brought 
her special blessing near the whole community and 
home to every heart. Above all, the old, original 
gospel, a common Father, a common Master, a 
common brotherhood, a common life, pure, sweet, 
and strong, as in the earliest Christian age, freed 
from all subtleties of metaphysics, whether Greek 
or Roman, whether mediaeval or modern, made 
plain to meet each daily need, most human be- 
cause most divine, must come with growing clear- 
ness from the preacher's lips, and through the life 
of preacher and of people too, until all men under- 
stand and feel its power. How large, how diffi- 
cult, this task must prove, how slowly its results 
will come, no pastor need be told. But he who 
in the hardest field holds this ideal steadfastly be- 
fore his own eyes and before his church, finds 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION 35 



interest and courage as the years go on; and lie 
who believes the gospel still divine will never 
doubt the large fulfillment yet to come. Mean- 
while, the very discipline of every day develops 
mind and heart, enlarges his experience, deepens 
his love for all humanity around him, and gives 
his ministry an ever varied and absorbing claim 
and charm. 

III. A third and last direction in which the 
minister feels the changed conditions of to-day is 
in the cure of souls. I like this good old phrase 
which has too largely passed out of use. It lays 
the emphasis on the pastor's special work; it 
makes distinct and imperative the individual rela- 
tion in which he stands to every member of his 
church and parish, the claim of every heart on his 
peculiar care. 

This close and individual relation to every soul 
has always been ideal, rather than actual, indeed ; 
an object to be held in view, not an end at any 
time attained. And the possibilities of fulfilling 
this charge to-day would seem at first far less 
than in other days. To the ordinary observer, in- 
deed, there is no respect in which the function 
of the ministry and the life of the parish have 
changed more evidently and more completely than 
this. We have read in religious histories and 
memoirs, and our mothers and fathers have told 



86 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 

us, how the minister of other days made his stated 
round of the parish, gathering each family to- 
gether in turn, the parents with their children, 
and questioning each person in regard to his spir- 
itual welfare and his knowledge of the Bible and 
the catechism. This custom has w^holly passed 
away, and cannot be revived under present condi- 
tions ; and this, it is said, was clearly faithful pas- 
toral work, a true cure of souls, in place of which 
no regular and systematic method has been de- 
vised, and for which the desultory and often in- 
judicious teaching of the modern Sunday-school is 
at best a very imperfect substitute. Of the value 
of this custom in its time and place, and as wisely 
used, I have no doubt : of the decline in religious 
knowledge among our people, whatever the cause 
may be, I fear there can be no question ; and of 
the insufficiency of the Sunday-school at its best 
to take the place of definite personal teaching I 
am also profoundly convinced. But, for all this, 
the custom here described was never in a strict 
sense the cure of souls, whatever opportunity it 
may have opened for further acquaintance with 
individual hearts ; it belonged to the preacher, to 
the teacher at least, not distinctively to the pastor. 
Catechizing, however useful and excellent, must 
not be confounded with the cure of souls. And 
the pastor never has fulfilled his charge until his 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 37 



own soul meets the soul lie would help, alone, un- 
distracted, with all the freedom and confidence of 
personal intimacy. This highest form of ministry 
was needed and was exercised in other days : it 
cannot be outgrown ; the need, and the opportu- 
nity, were never greater, I believe, than now. 

The very absence of that religious training com- 
mon in the past makes this need of personal min- 
istry the greater. Fifty years ago, every man of 
average intelligence in a New England parish had 
his memory stored with accepted truths : they were 
held in the head, it may be, not in the heart ; the 
formulas in which they were cast were narrow and 
rigid ; grave errors grew around the truths, crude 
superstitions mingled with the teaching in the 
hearer's mind ; but the truths were there, unques- 
tioned, lodged firmly in the thought, a safeguard 
against temptation, an anchor in trouble. To-day, 
no such reserve force remains to the man of aver- 
age intelligence. The old superstitions are gone, 
but the truths, once solid, seem to him shaken too. 
He has not thought beyond them, or away from 
them ; he has only been caught up and carried 
along, unthinking, by the current around him. 
He has lost the partial, outward support of tradi- 
tional, inherited, almost unconscious beliefs ; he 
has not found the inward surety of personal faith ; 
he feels himself unanchored, on the open sea. 



88 



THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



adrift. What he needs is the strength of a brave, 
calm, Christian friendship, of a faith incarnate in 
another's life, intelligent, broad, and open of 
mind ; fearless, also, because sure of itself, and 
far more sure of the Master; able thus in His 
Name to reach out the hand of ready helpfulness, 
revealing life through life. Through such faith 
and friendship, the pastor must fulfill his charge 
in common life to-day. 

Others there are in every parish, fewer in num- 
ber than the class just mentioned, for whom this 
personal ministry is yet more needful. These are 
the young and thoughtful minds, interested in all 
living movements of our age, sensitive to the mod- 
ern spirit, questioning all forms, all facts, all 
faiths, to find a higher truth. Bound by no tra- 
ditions of the past, unfettered by present conven- 
tion, they seem to timid minds irreverent. Among 
older and religious people, both deference and dis- 
cretion may keep them silent ; but the silence only 
hides the widening distance between their thoughts 
and the beaten paths behind them. These spirits 
also need a friend to win their slow and jealous 
confidence, call out their full confession, enter into 
their every doubt ; a friend of riper years, taught 
from his own experience, trained in the Master's 
school to understanding, sympathy, and patience : 
skillful to lead, not force, their steps from the few 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION 39 



things they still find true to the higher truth not 
found as yet ; able to reveal that higher truth 
through life before the laggard thought has 
learned the way. This task of faith and friend- 
ship, this personal ministry, may fall indeed to 
any brave, strong, tender Christian soul ; it needs 
the inward grace alone, no laying on of hands im- 
parts the heavenly gift ; but the pastor must 
surely count this service a sacred, most impor- 
tant part of his mission. 

These spirits, and not the men of easier faith 
and lighter thought, must shape and mould the 
movement of the church that is to be ; out of 
their difficulties, their doubts, once overcome, their 
usefulness and strength will grow ; their own ex- 
perience will discipline them to broader, better ser- 
vice. The pastor who wins them builds not for 
the present only, but for the future; he serves 
another generation beside his own ; he reaches 
through these consecrated lives a wider circle than 
his eyes can measure, or his faith can foresee. 

How delicate, how difficult, under these condi- 
tions the pastor's task has grown ! What fine rare 
gifts of nature and of grace this personal minis- 
try demands ! What heavenly wisdom must blend 
with human tenderness in him who is called to dis- 
charge this service ! Like the Great Angel of the 
Gate, in Dante's Vision, the pastor of to-day must 



40 



THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 



bear two keys, one of gold and one of silver. The 
golden key is the symbol of his true authority 
within the church, received from Christ himself. 
The silver key, which always he first puts in use, 
betokens that wisdom of spiritual adaptation, 
taught through experience and lowly patience, by 
which he learns to discern and deal with each 
heart aright : — 

" Pin cara h V una ; ma 1' altra vuol troppa 
D' arte e d' ingegno, avanti che disserri, 
Perch' eir e quella che il nodo disgroppa." ^ 

" There was no Iron," says a quaint old Eng- 
lish writer, — " There was no Iron in any of the 
Stuff or Utensils of the Sanctuary. Hard and In- 
flexible Spirits are not fit for the Service of the 
Church." 2 The Hard Church, a modern essayist 
styles men of this type and temper ; and their 
unfitness for the delicate task before us, his own 
words well point out. " The Hard Church," he 
writes, " necessarily relies on what may be called 
the inorganic laws of human thought and action, 
and ignores the more delicate laws of growth and 
change discoverable in social and individual char- 
acter." ^ How fatal this omission I Here lies the 

1 Dante, Purgatorio, vol. ix. lines 124-126. 

2 John Edwards, The Preacher ^ vol. i. p. 169. 

3 R. H. Hutton, Theological Essays, p. 340. 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION, 41 



key to the whole difficulty ; and here, by contrast, 
we learn what type and temper the pastor's task 
to-day demands. " The inorganic laws of human 
thought and action," — how narrow their sphere 
has grown ! " In social and individual charac- 
ter," how much more clearly " the delicate laws of 
growth and change " are now discerned ! With 
life, not mechanism, the pastor deals to-day ; and 
life, subtle and elusive everywhere, above all in 
the human spirit, cannot be rudely grasped ; it 
yields alone to the finer touch of love. By under- 
standing, sympathy, and patience, this delicate 
charge must be fulfilled; and as these graces of 
the spirit grow, the pastor's life will bring to 
others, and to himself, the larger blessing. 

In the duties of the pastorate, then, as in the 
broader field of public service and in the inter- 
l^retation of the Scriptures to his age, the minister 
of Jesus Christ is called to-day to a mission of 
unmeasured possibilities and growing power. In 
this direction, also, as in those already followed, 
the claim of the ministry is as clear, its work as 
large, and its attraction as strong as in other days. 

Thus, in a manner of necessity discursive, but 
not desultory, as I hope, I have followed the broad 
lines along which my subject seemed to lead. 
With all the widenino; chano^es in thouii'ht and 
life to-day, changes affecting our conditions and 



42 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 

our conceptions also, the place and claim of the 
Christian ministry, we find, remain. And if any 
of its glories, as the world may count them, have 
passed away, they were only outward : the glory 
which abides is alone inward and excelleth. JSfon 
ministrari, sed ministrare^ was the Master's 
motto ; in ministry, in personal service, not in 
any honors of place or power, preacher and pastor 
find their true distinction. Such service the world 
still needs, needs more indeed for the very changes 
of the present : a ministry, deep, earnest, spirit- 
ual, that speaks from life, — through life, — to 
life. And with a Scripture to interpret, no longer 
a dead letter but a living Word, in a society so 
rich in varied life and movement, to hearts on 
every hand that yearn for light and help, no more 
absorbing charge can claim the consecrated soul 
than such a ministry. 

The limitations of my theme have made my 
view but partial. The great, eternal features of 
the preacher's and the pastor's work have been 
lightly touched : the interests which are not changed 
have not come within my purpose. My task has 
been to seize distinctive features created or empha- 
sized at least by the changed conditions of to-day. 
The highest feature I have reserved until the last. 
I count this an inestimable blessing to preacher 
and pastor alike : that never more truly than now, 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 43 



under no conditions more fully tlian under ours, 
has the minister been called to personal following 
of his Master, both in the method of his work and 
in the source and spring of his power. The only 
authority that carries moral and spiritual weight 
to-day is the authority of character. And the 
character of Jesus Christ the w^orld makes its only 
standard for judging the motives and conduct of 
his disciples. However impatient it may be with 
creed and dogma and ritual, it recognizes under 
all differences of name and communion kinship in 
deed and character with Him ; and for such kinship 
it shows profoundest reverence. To be like Him 
must always be the minister's ideal ; but lower 
standards and confusing tests of men how often 
divert the mind from the higher purpose ! How 
helpful it should prove, when the world's own 
expectation seeks that supreme and single level! 
Again, the methods of the Master's ministry, so 
personal, so delicate, so carefully adapted to indi- 
vidual need, were never more in keeping with the 
pastor's work than now. And as he studies in 
each detail the Master's tenderness and searching 
insight, or strives and prays to catch the gracious 
spirit that informs the living gospel as a whole, 
his inward life must grow in likeness to his Lord 
with each new measure that he gains of the three- 
fold gift of ministry, — understanding, sympathy, 
and patience. 



44 THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY: 

For thirteen years it has been my privilege to 
share the work of preacher and of pastor. That 
work I leave with sincere reluctance, and only at 
the call of what seems a nearer, but I dare not 
say a higher, duty. Through all these years, the 
present opportunity and the great ideal of this 
calling have grown upon me, until I feel that every 
preacher, like St. Paul, should glorify his ministry ; 
So^afo) is the Apostle's word. But when I remember 
how far achievement lags behind ideal, how even 
this imperfect picture I have drawn puts the reality 
to shame, I am moved to borrow from St. Gregory, 
the earliest and still the keenest analyst of the 
pastor's charge, his closing words : — 

" Dum monstrare qualis esse debeat pastor in- 
vigilo, pulchrum depinxi hominem pictor f oedus : 
aliosque ad perfectionis littus dirigo, qui adhuc in 
delictorum fluctibus versor." ^ 

It has been the honor of this seat of sacred 
learning, it has been the honor of this special chair 
into which I am now inducted, that it has stead- 
fastly upheld a high ideal of the Christian minis- 
try. My three more immediate predecessors had 
each a distinct and important part in this great 
work. One sketched in broad and masterly out- 
line the ideal of a strong and intellectual preacher. 

^ S. Gregorii Magni, Reguloe Pastoralis Liber, sub fine. 



PRESENT CLAIM AND ATTRACTION. 45 



Another filled in the picture with almost infinite 
fineness of detail. The third inspired the preach- 
er's heart with visions of wider fields of service and 
of conquest. To keep these fair ideals fresh and 
living still, as in the dear and memorable days 
gone by, and to help my younger brethren to 
realize and seize the growing opportunities, the 
urgent claims, the distinctive attractions, of the 
ministry to-day, is the task to which, with the 
blessing of God, I would now devote my life. 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



I. 

Introduction. — Explanation of Terms. — Primitive and 
Fundamental Elements in Preaching. 

HoMiLETiCS, it must be premised at the begin- 
ning of our discussion, is at once a science and an 
art : it covers both the theory and the practice of 
preaching. " A science," says Whewell, himself 
a passed master in both departments, " a science 
teaches us to know ; an art, to do." The distinc- 
tion is well drawn and concisely stated ; it has an 
evident value in giving definiteness and precision 
to our use of terms : but doing, we must not for- 
get, can never be really divorced from knowing, 
and in the higher arts and sciences, especially, 
the relations between theory and practice are most 
subtle and vital. The distinction of Whewell, 
therefore, must be supplemented by the earlier 
dictum of Dr. Campbell : " All art is founded in 
science, and the science is of little value which 
does not serve as a foundation to some beneficial 
art." In the study now before us, at least, both 
statements must be held clearly in mind, and the 



LECTURES OX HOMILETICS. 



47 



inferences which follow from each should be car- 
ried to their just conclusion. 

Preaching, then, is an art. And art, by its very 
name, implies adaptation : it implies training, also, 
discipline, acquired skill, superadded to any and 
to all native gifts. We need not long delay over 
the old objection, so often brought forward and 
refuted, which, from the peculiar sacredness of his 
calling, declared the preacher free from all rules, 
from all human art. This objection has passed 
away, together with the kindred idea of genius as 
something above all law, a law unto itself alone. 
Genius, we have learned, is not emancipation 
from law, unfettered lawlessness and caprice : it 
is, rather, the finer, higher, more perfect fulfill- 
ment of law, drawn from insight instead of reason- 
ing, and wrought out in a freer, often an uncon- 
scious spirit. Inspiration, also, in the preacher as 
in the Word he is sent to interpret, is no irregu- 
lar, spasmodic, uncertain impulse ; it respects the 
nature which it informs ; it works, not above nor 
apart from, but through the laws of human intelli- 
gence. Art, on the other hand, true art, is not 
lifeless mechanism, a contradiction of nature ; 
rather, it is the parallel, or better, the continuation 
of nature, working through kindred and organic 
laws toward a kindred end. There is no irrev- 
erence, therefore, in the bold hyperbole of Sir 



48 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



Thomas Browne, Nature is the art of God. And 
Montaigne but expresses the same thought in sub- 
tler, more impersonal form, when he writes : II 
faut que la nature s'artialise." The sacredness of 
the ministry, then, suffers no detraction when we 
speak of preaching as an art, and insist upon the 
need of discipline and intelligent practice in him 
who would discharge aright this sacred function. 

Beside the art of preaching, there is a science 
of preaching, also. The word, science, sounds at 
first unnatural and incongruous in this connection, 
but there is no other word to express the idea. 
Theory is sometimes used, the Theory of Preach- 
ing ; but the term is too subjective : it lacks the 
outward solidity, the firmness, of established fact. 
Science is our only term to cover a broad, com- 
plete, systematic setting forth of the body of laws, 
and of principles below those laws, on which all 
art must rest. If all art, to borrow the language 
of Dr. Campbell again, is founded in science, then 
the larger, the more difficult and complex a given 
art may be, the deeper must these foundations be 
laid.^ The reign of empiricism is always narrow as 

1 In practical art, says Whewell, principles are unseen 
guides, leading us by invisible strings through paths where 
the end alone is looked at. It is for science to direct and 
purge our vision, so that these airy ties, these principles and 
laws, generalizations and theories, become distinct objects of 
vision. — Quoted by Kidder, Homiletics. 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 49 

well as short-lived. The preacher whose art rests 
on no broader basis than his own practice and 
personal experience will find although knowledge 
comes, that wisdom, which is far more important 
and useful, lingers still. The broader, on the 
other hand, the preacher's survey of his chosen 
science, and the closer his study both of the mas- 
ters of his special calling and of the principles 
upon which all preaching rests, the more effective 
and permanent his own work will become. There 
is generally little originality in error. The larger 
part of our own mistakes have been made many 
times before us : we might have avoided them 
had our intelligence been greater ; and knowledge 
bought by experience costs too dear, if it comes 
too late to be used. If we would put the ripened 
wisdom of others, then, in place of that tardy 
knowledge we ourselves might gain, if we would 
anticipate thus the slow results of experience, we 
must add science to art, or, better, we must build 
our art on the broad, deep foundations of science. 

There is, then, an art of preaching ; there is a 
science of preaching also ; and the relations which 
bind them together are close and vital. You can- 
not separate them without serious loss to both. 
This is true in a measure of any study of homi- 
letics, however theoretical that study may be, even 
although it be taken up merely as an object of 
4 



50 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



curious interest, with no intent to carry the prin- 
ciples discovered into practice. In nature and 
essence, indeed, neither the art nor the science can 
be understood apart from the other. But it is 
true in still larger measure of the study as we now 
approach it, with a practical purpose, and within 
definite limits of time. Throughout the discussion 
on which we enter, then, at every step we must 
keep the art and the science side by side ; we must 
remember the twofold truth, as art has its begin- 
ning in science, so science has its end in art. Each 
theory must be tested by practice ; all practice 
must be measured and judged under the broader, 
clearer light of theory. Both science and art, both 
theory and practice, however, have their chief in- 
terest and value for us in their distinct relation to 
the actual work of the preacher, as they deepen 
and enlarge the power and permanent effectiveness 
with which he fulfils his sacred charge. 

At this point, in a line with the considerations 
already offered, certain familiar terms must be 
noted and explained. The list is not long ; it is 
not meant to be exhaustive ; such words alone are 
chosen as throw some light by their derivation 
and usage upon our study as a whole, and thus de- 
velop still further the general idea of preaching 
in its nature and essence. Where this purpose 
is served, minuteness of detail may well be par- 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 51 

doned. " Homiletics " and "homily," ''sermon" 
and " preaching," call for special attention and 
definition. 

Homiletics, like certain names of other and 
more familiar sciences, like ethics, mathematics, 
physics, for instance, though plural in form, is 
treated to-day as a noun in the singular. Usage 
even now, however, is not entirely uniform, and 
before the present century it inclined in the other 
direction, all these words being made plural in 
syntax as well as form. The form itself has been 
explained as, in part, an imitation of Greek usage 
in words from which these terms were taken, ra 
yOiKOL, TO. (f)V(TLKd, aud, lu part, as due to the range 
and complexity of the subjects covered by the 
sciences in question. But neither explanation can 
be counted complete or satisfactory : both are 
found wanting in the particular case before us. 
If the range of subject covered be considered, 
there is no reason why rhetoric, the genus, should 
be in the singular, and homiletics, generally con- 
sidered as a species, in the plural. And if Greek 
usage were to determine, homiletics, like mathe- 
matics, should be singular in form. For the later 
Greek of Plutarch, at least, recognized homiletic 
as the art of conversation. 

Homiletics and homily, to pass from the form 
to the meaning, belong to a group of words, the 



52 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



origin and relations of which it is not a piece of 
pedantry, but a useful study to trace. The mean- 
ing of this group in the New Testament, and in 
the early church, must be noticed. "O/xtXog, the 
original of the little group, has not been trans- 
ferred to other and modern tongues : it occurs but 
once in the New Testament, and there is omitted 
by the best texts (Rev. xviii. 17), to describe the 
crowd that throng the ships and witness the over- 
throw of Babylon : a mingled multitude, united 
by common fear and wonderment. '0/xiXta, the 
original form of " homily," occurs but once also in 
the New Testament, but in an unquestioned pas- 
sage (1 Cor. XV. 33), in the verse borrowed by St. 
Paul from the Thais of Menander, and restored 
by the Revisers to its rightful meaning, " Evil 
company," not communications, " doth corrupt 

good manners," (^Oelpova-iv rjOr) XPV^^^ ofxikLai KaKaL 

The verb, o/xtXctv, is found four times in the New 
Testament. Twice it is used of the two disciples 
on the way to Emmaus, " they communed with 
each other, . . . while they communed together " 
(Luke xxiv. 14, 15) ; once of St. Paul at Troas, 

and talked a long while " (Acts xx. 11) ; and 
once of Felix, who, after the pointed preaching of 
the apostle, " sent for him the oftener, and com- 
muned with him " (Acts xxiv. 26). 

These few instances show us how this group of 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 53 

words passed from their first use, of a casual 
crowd gathered by a slight and momentary inter- 
est in common, through a regular and formal fel- 
lowship, to the familiar converse, the friendly talk, 
that made the delight of such association. In 
classic Greek, these words had been used of the 
communion and intercourse, and especially of the 
enlightening conversation of philosophers with 
their pupils. Xenophon applies them to Socrates 
in the Memorabilia, I. ii. 6, 15. This further 
meaning of instruction, some would find in the 
bfXLkrj(Ta% of St. Paul at Troas. His conversation 
there is supposed to have taken the form of expo- 
sition, like the ntl^'^'^, which formed part of the reg- 
ular service in the synagogue, and which might be 
delivered by priest, or elder, or any other compe- 
tent person. Traces of this custom can be seen 
both in the Acts and in the Gospels. The address 
of the Master in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 
iv. 16-21) was such a niz;'!"^ ; such also was the 
word of exhortation which the rulers of the syna- 
gogue asked of St. Paul and Barnabas at Anti- 
och in Pisidia (Acts xiii. 15). From the syna- 
gogue the custom was carried over to the church, 
and the name of homily was early given to such 
a discourse, in which, as Justin Martyr tells us 
(Apol. c. 67), the minister admonishes the people, 
stirring them up to an imitation of the good works 



54 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 

which have been brought before their notice. At 
a later date, a more formal address was introduced 
under the name of Aoyos, but the simpler exposition 
still held its place and was known as a homily. 
Through the Latin Church, under the influence of 
the Old French form, the word passed into our 
language, together with its cognate and derivative 
terms. Less common to-day than in older usage, 
the homily preserves with us its special sense, and 
is applied to a simple, homely, often informal ex- 
position of scriptural teaching. Of such a char- 
acter were the Books of Homilies set forth in the 
reigns of Edward VI. and of Queen Elizabeth, 
which were so long and so widely used in the Eng- 
lish Church. 

A gathered multitude ; a united and permanent 
fellowship ; a common thought and language grow- 
ing out of great interests held in common ; an ele- 
ment of instruction, or, in broader and more spir- 
itual terms, of edification ; — these are the succes- 
sive ideas which the history of this group of words 
suggests. The suggestion goes far beyond the 
narrow limits of the homily as now defined : it 
marks the shape and color of the early conception 
of all preaching ; it reaches in its effects the whole 
science and art of homiletics. We pause, then, 
to gather from this special study a further idea of 
the character of Christian preaching at the begin- 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 55 



ning, and to find therein certain fundamental ele- 
ments which remain through all changes to mould 
and direct our general conception of discourse in 
the pulpit. 

1. Christian preaching begins in the Christian 
society : it has its roots in the Christian Church. 
The ofxiXia proceeds from the o/xtXo?. The college 
of the apostles was the centre of the apostolic 
ministry. The multitude of the disciples in the 
upper room were the united and ]Dermanent fellow- 
ship that antedated St. Peter's first sermon, and 
from which the first preaching of the Word went 
forth. And, however far the early missionaries 
may have gone from the church at home, they 
never forgot the bonds that united them with her 
fellowship, nor suffered the strength and meaning 
of their spiritual relation to her to be lost. They 
were still, in St. Paul's significant phrase, apostles 
of Christ, and apostles of the churches also, and the 

glory of Christ, aTToo-roXoL iKKXrjcnojv, So^a 'Kpicrrov,^ 

This truth in the early conception of preaching 
is not, and cannot be outgrown ; but, in churches 
of freer form especially, it is far too often over- 
looked. Where the emphasis is laid, as with our 
churches, on no formal, outward union, but upon 
unity of spirit within, there is the greater need 
that the united, continuous, divine life through the 
1 2 Cor. viii. 23. 



56 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS, 

individual churcli should be deeply realized by her 
members. For the sake of others, then, and for 
his own sake, on the very threshold of his minis- 
try every preacher should feel his close relation 
as a preacher to the organic life of the church he 
serves. To feel and share this life before his work 
begins will help him toward a true ideal of his 
calling : to make his people also realize this com- 
mon life with growing power is essential to the 
fulfilment of his own great charge. As a preacher, 
he must speak both to the church and from the 
church unto the world. In each direction, his 
words wdll gather force and impulse from the 
united life he feels behind his utterance. In both 
appeals he should speak, not as an individual 
alone, but as the voice of a living community, 
an eternal fellowship. Beside him, as the elders 
stood by Ezra on his pulpit of wood, on the right 
hand and the left, in spirit if not in form, stands 
the church he represents, with which his life is 
united : through his lips, wherever he carries the 
message of the Gospel, both the Spirit and the 
Bride say, Come ! And when he is called to teach 
a deeper, larger truth within the church, through 
this living fellowship he gains a clearer insight, a 
broader sympathy, a more persuasive accent. The 
experience of the church, when this common life is 
touched, answers to his appeal and rises to better 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 57 



understanding and ser^ace. No brilliant play of 
individual, but isolated, genius, no personal, un- 
shared experience even, however profound, can 
equal in deep and permanent effect that preach- 
ing which strikes its roots in Christian fellowship, 
which speaks from the church to the church, and 
through the church to men. From the o/itAos comes 
the ofxiXia still. 

2. Christian preaching moves in the circle of 
Christian truths. As preaching began within the 
church, so it drew its theme from the common 
source of Christian life. It dwelt with largest 
emphasis, with strongest insistence, on the com- 
mon truths on which the church was built. Its 
spirit was exposition from the &st : it sought to 
sound more deeply, and bring forth more clearly, 
the divine, revealed, indwelling Word. Even the 
later, more formal address, no less than the sim- 
pler homily, dwelt upon these central, distinctive, 
Christian truths ; all else was incidental to the 
development of these. 

This feature of the primitive conception, also, 
is fundamental and abiding. Christian preaching 
has not exhausted, it cannot exhaust, the power 
and meaning of the Gospel : it still moves, there- 
fore, within the circle of Christian truths. JVon 
nova^ sed nove^ has ever been its motto. It seeks 
to make the old, familiar truth felt with new force 



68 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS, 

rather than to discover some new message. It 
finds the Word that came of old, when interpreted 
by the living Spirit, made new to meet the chan- 
ging needs of each generation, and proved thereby 
both living and divine. The streams of life, which 
always are flowing forth, reveal the living source 
from which they are derived. 

All this implies no narrowing of the preacher's 
sympathies or of his research. It puts no check 
upon the freedom of his movement, or the breadth 
and keenness of his interest in any realm of hu- 
man thought. It involves, indeed, a close and con- 
stant study of whatever gives him a better under- 
standing of his age, and of the Scriptures in their 
largest, deepest meaning. It leaves his mind both 
open and sensitive to every change in growth and 
light, and his heart both hospitable and sympa- 
thetic toward every form of genuine faith and 
aspiration among men. But it implies, on the 
other hand, his clear, profound conviction that the 
Gospel of Jesus Christ alone contains enough of 
truth and power, of light and heat, to redeem man- 
kind, and create a new, divine type of character. 
Such a conviction his study of the world with all 
its forms and faiths may well confirm, as it makes 
plain the universal need, while his personal know- 
ledge of the unfailing power of the Gospel in its 
present effects within him and around him will 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS, 59 



give his message positiveness, and point, and 
fervor. 

The great, distinctive Christian truths made the 
strength of the earliest preachers ; they make the 
strength of all vital preaching to-day. Not the 
truths which the Gospel shares with earlier faiths, 
not the interpretations which metaphysics puts 
upon the plainest teaching, not the lesser, although 
distinctive. Christian truths. The circle of great 
truths, rather, Christ's revelation of the Father 
and the Spirit, of man in the divine purpose, the 
present failure and the largest possibility, of men 
in their relation to one another and to Him, — these 
are the dynamics of the preacher, here is his lever 
with which to move the world. In this circle his 
preaching will turn. 

3. Christian preaching takes its rise in conver- 
sation ; it is set in the conversational key. When 
ofxiXta gained the special sense of speech, it carried 
still the old associations, drawn from a broader, 
but friendly, familiar intercourse. The warmth of 
Christian fellowship was felt through the earliest 
preaching, and inspired the name first applied to 
such discourse. And when the statelier sermon 
and the larger gathering of disciples seemed re- 
mote from these humble beginnings, the greatest 
of early preachers retained the glow, the homely 
nearness, of the primitive form. Of Chrysostom's 



60 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 

addresses, a later writer says : " They are called 
speeches [or sermons, Adyot], but they are more 
like homilies, for this reason, above others, that he 
again and again addresses his hearers as actually 
present before his eyes." ^ The language, whether 
compliment or censure, is striking. 

It may be questioned whether oratory of any 
kind is rightly set in any other key ; whether at 
least our present age admits a different style from 
this. The speeches of John Bright and of Wendell 
Phillips, and our generation has seen no orators 
who take precedence of these two, have proved 
that the conversational style leaves room for the 
highest flights of eloquence, while it preserves 
throughout the strength, the sanity, the absolute 
reality of common speech. But whatever may be 
said of other forms of public speaking, in preach- 
ing, at least, this quality is indispensable. The 
poet, as Wordsworth has taught us, no less than 
the man of science, must compose with his eye 
upon the object, if his verse is to share the reality, 
the inevitableness, of nature. And the preacher 
must think, and speak, and write, if write he must, 
with his eye upon his hearers, or, better, St. Paul 
would say, with his hearers always in his heart; 
otherwise he may produce a faultless essay, but 
he will miss the true effect of preaching. In the 

^ Photius, quoted by Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, p. 110. 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



61 



process of writing sermons, especially, this maxim 
needs to be remembered. The absent hearers must 
be pictured, felt, addressed, as j)resent, actually 
present before the eyes, as the early critic said of 
Chrysostom. This power of realizing the presence 
of others in the solitude of thought, and, hence, of 
speaking or writing as if conscious of the listening 
ear and the interested, responsive eye ; this power 
varies widely in the measure of native endowment. 
You feel it in a marked degree in the best of letter 
writers, like William Cowper. But the poorest 
native gift may be cultivated almost beyond belief, 
and, like other kinds of imagination, this should be 
developed and trained for the preacher's special 
purpose. Such training comes more readily, of 
course, when the preacher has a congregation of 
his own, and when the faces he sees from week to 
week before him become familiar by social inter- 
course and expressive by reason of personal ac- 
quaintance. But even from the irregular and scat- 
tered opportunities which the student finds, he may 
by patient effort call up and construct a congrega- 
tion to people his study, and give life and reality 
to his solitary thought. And from the very be- 
ginning of his ministry, the preacher should not 
forget that his art began in friendly. Christian 
conversation, and that the point, directness, and 
personal interest of the early preachers are needed 
still to clothe his words with power. 



62 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



4. Christian preaching from the beginning 
sought to instruct and edify the hearer. The 
6/xtXta of Socrates was meant to teach and to en- 
lighten his pupils. The exposition of the syna- 
gogue unfolded and made more clear the truth of 
Scripture. And from the first great sermon of St. 
Peter in the Acts, to reach the conscience through 
the mind and the heart has been the aim of Chris- 
tian preaching. While the Christian Church and 
fellowship gave motive and occasion for the preach- 
er's words, while the common truth below their 
united life made the basis of his witness, while the 
tone in which he spoke was familiar and conver- 
sational, there was always a higher point from 
which the preacher addressed his hearers, and to- 
ward which he strove to lift their thoughts and 
their lives. Not a sermon in the Acts, not an 
Epistle in the New Testament, forgets this twofold 
purpose, or fails to find therein a basis for direct 
appeal. 

This twofold purpose, to instruct and to edify, 
the preacher needs to bear in mind to-day. In 
every sermon, whatever its special aim and end 
may be, both elements should find their place. 
Whether the church or the world be directly ad- 
dressed, respect for the hearers demands them 
both. Without them, all fervor of appeal is like 
the crackling of thorns, a moment's blaze, but no 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



63 



lasting heat. A just appeal, and no otlier has an 
abiding force, must bear examination at the bar of 
the hearer's mind, after the sound of the preacher's 
voice has ceased. The earnest, honest effort to 
instruct and edify, to make some truth more plain 
and real, will alone endure that test. 

But the preacher, it may be said, cannot always 
speak from a higher point than his hearers have 
gained. Their acquaintance both with the world 
and Viith the Word of God may be wider than his ; 
their experience may be larger and deeper. The 
objection is specious, but not valid. Whatever the 
preacher's limitation in years and personal expe- 
rience, his training and preparation have given 
him a certain advantage over his hearers : that ad- 
vantage should be increased by every opportunity 
for leisure and special study, for meditation and 
prayer, and by constant practice in public teaching 
and exposition. 

For the mind, to borrow Lowell's favorite illus- 
tration, like the dyer's hand, becomes subdued to 
that in which it works. Let no man despise thy 
youth, writes St. Paul to his younger brother in 
the ministry, and that his teaching and conduct 
might command the just respect of men, he adds 
these counsels : " Be diligent in these things," ravTa 
/xeXeVa; "give thyself wholly to them," eV TovToi<i lctOl; 



64 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



"that thy progress may be manifest unto all," ha 

(Tov rj TrpoKOTTT] pavepa fj iracTLv.^ 

These four primitive and fundamental elements 
in preaching have been suggested by the history 
and usage of the Greek words, homily and homi- 
letics. Two Latin terms now claim attention, " ser- 
mon " and " preaching." From these also, w^hen 
compared with their Greek equivalents, we may 
gather other features in the primitive conception 
of the preacher's mission and purpose. 

Sermon, in the English and the French forms 
alike, is an abbreviated accusative of the Latin 
sermo, Sermo is of uncertain origin, although 
generally derived more or less directly from sero^ 
to join, or bind together. The Roman derivation 
Varro gives in these words : Serino est a serie : 
sermo enim non potest in uno homine solo^ sed uhi 
oratio cum altero conjuncta. Others would con- 
nect the word rather with serta or conserta oratio,^ 
laying the emphasis, not on the succession of 
speakers, but upon the succession of ideas inter- 
woven in the same speech. I mention these de- 
tails, because, although the word was first used of 
conversation, even in Roman usage, and still more 
under Christian interpretation, sermo carried the 
idea of consecutiveness, and hence of plan and 
formal discourse. It was the Latin equivalent of 
^ 1 Timothy, iv. 15. 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 65 



the Greek Xoyos, which we have seen was used in 
contrast to o/xcAta, and which emphasized the idea 
of reason, the logic of speech. The sermon is thus, 
as Dr. Hatch suggests, the creation of rhetoric, of 
Greek rhetoric : it implies synthesis as well as 
analysis : it points to the time in which Christian 
preaching had taken a studied form, and had be- 
come already in the highest sense a science and an 
art. 

"Preaching" and "preach" have come to us 
from the Latin through the medium of early 
French, the nearer Saxon derivative predician be- 
ing thus supplanted. Praedicare, the Latin orig- 
inal, means to cry out, to make public, to proclaim 
before men. It suggests the herald's function, and 
is of kindred meaning with the Greek Kr^pvaaoy,^ 
The latter is the most common word to describe 
the preacher's work in the New Testament. Of the 
other Greek words used of the same great office, 
StaXeyo/xat Suggests a reasoning or discussion, while 

the common KarayyeXXw, the rare StayyeAAw, e^ayyeXt^o) 

emphasize the relation of the messenger to the sen- 
der, the latter revealing also the joyous character of 
the message he bears. Through all these terms, the 
Greek and the Latin, the command of the Master 
to the first disciples finds an echo, " What I tell you 
in the darkness, speak ye in the light : and what 

1 St. Matthew x. 27. 
6 



66 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



ye hear in the ear, proclaim upon the housetops," 

Krjpv^are iirl tCjv ScD/xarwv."^ 

From these words, then, from sermon and preach- 
ing, we follow the primitive conception in further 
detail, and remark again — 

5. Christian preaching was early and naturally 
developed into the systematic and logical discourse. 
The simple story of the Master's life, told as we 
j&nd it in the Gospels, did not suffice even for the 
age of the Apostles. Further development of the 
fundamental truth was asked, the meaning of the 
Master's words and mission, his living relation to 
the earlier Revelation and to the disciples who 
should follow after Him. To meet such question- 
ing and such needs the great Epistles were written, 
the Ephesians and Colossians with their lofty vision 
and majestic sweep, the Romans and the Hebrews 
with their marshalling of prophetic evidence and 
array of argument. And what the great Epistles 
did for their readers the preacher must have done, 
in his measure, for the same class of hearers also. 
Nor is this all. These very Epistles were designed 
in the first instance to be read in the gatherings of 

^ Preaching. Krjpvi, was he that called the People together 
on Publick Business, in the Cities of Greece, and made Proc- 
lamations in the Markets and all Publick Places, with a loud 
voice. Saxons called Bishops God's Bedels. Edwards, 
Preacher, I. 182. 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 67 



the brethren, — they were written, that is, with the 
eye upon the hearers, not the readers. With such 
a purpose in view, the writers, who were also 
preachers of the Word, neither would nor could 
have adopted a distinctively written style : their 
choice and their natural instinct alike would lead 
them to keep closely to the manner of their public 
address, to write as they spoke. Such a conclusion, 
I think, borne out by the evidence of the writings 
before us. The Epistle to the Hebrews, especially, 
is oratory, and oratory of the highest type : it 
speaks to the ear, not to the eye : it gains full 
force only when it is delivered, like the Oration on 
the Crown. Read aloud its varied and vigorous 
Greek, and you may catch even now through bold 
figure and striking imagery the sweep and move- 
ment of sound as well as thought, and feel the 
power and freedom of the practised speaker. The 
Epistles of St. Paul, also, less stately and sustained, 
are spoken words. With his eye upon his hearers, 
the rude Galatian, the subtle Greek, the Roman 
schooled to thoughts of power and law, he utters 
his message, abrupt and broken, it may be, or in 
firm set logic of his own, or in breathless flight ris- 
ing through circle after circle of lofty thought. In 
the other Epistles of the New Testament no less, 
we may find echoes of the apostolic preaching. In 
each Epistle, an individual element, the speech of 



68 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS, 

the writer, like St. Peter's Galilean accent, bewrays 
him. St. John, with the few words so often re- 
peated, clear, simple, yet profound, intense with 
love that burns as well as brightens ; St. James, 
concise in utterance, weighty in meaning, strong, 
severe, now rhythmic and sonorous, now like the 
lightning swift and sudden, a master who unites 
the pregnant, pointed brevity of Demosthenes with 
the SetvoTT/? of the Hebrew prophets ; St. Peter, dis- 
tinctively the preacher among the Apostles, quick, 
sensitive, and sympathetic, coining his words to 
make an image striking in effect, a speaker by 
native temperament and gift ; — we may see and 
hear them all, while we study these few but pre- 
cious pages, as they spoke among their brethren, or 
to the wider circles of Jews and of Greeks around 
the little Church. Nor can the preacher find a 
better manual than these gathered writings afford, 
to broaden his idea of the power and possibilities 
of public speech. 

The Epistles, then, disclose to us the methods to 
which the writers were accustomed in their preach- 
ing and public address. But, further, they teach 
us, and the lesson is hardly less interesting or less 
important, what the capacity and understanding of 
their hearers must have been. These Epistles were 
written, of course, with the expectation that they 
would be understood as well as heard ; not by 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS, 



69 



every hearer, perhaps ; not by any one hearer, it 
may be, thoroughly, at once, and in all parts ; but 
in the general tenor of their teaching, and by the 
gathered disciples as a whole. What trained intel- 
ligence, such an understanding must have presup- 
posed ! what ability both to follow lines of close- 
knit argument, and to grasp at once great truths, 
however profound or sublime ! Imagine the Ephe- 
sians or the Colossians as just written, and read for 
the first time in any Christian congregation in New 
England to-day : how many hearers would gather 
their meaning, or feel their impulse? how many 
would grow restless, and wander in mind? how 
few would ask that the same words be read again 
in their hearing, that they might add to the truth 
already discerned the truth that still lay beyond 
their understanding? 

It is not, it is true, the mind alone that must 
have been trained for such intelligent hearing ; it 
is the heart that needed most and first especial cul- 
ture ; and the interest once awakened, intelligence 
is rapidly and by that very fact developed. The 
early Christians came chiefly from the humbler 
walks of life ; few of them, if any, had shared the 
training of schools and philosophies. But the faith 
they now embraced was itself an educative force, a 
discipline of thought as well as of feeling. It grew 
out of the older Scriptures, and for its justification 



70 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 

those Scriptures must be searched and compared ; 
it was built upon a revealed, creative Word, and 
that Word must be examined and understood. The 
believer was exhorted to be ready always to give 
answer to every man that asked him a reason con- 
cerning the hope that was in him. All this would 
stimulate and quicken thought, and make the newly 
awakened spirit eager to seek and ready to take 
the teaching of apostles and preachers. The intel- 
lectual movement among the people, despised by 
rabbis and philosophers alike, must be taken into 
account if we would appreciate the spiritual move- 
ment. The training and discipline of disciples 
were not forgotten in the effort to win converts ; 
the kingdom was not extended widely alone, it was 
built upon deep foundations of intelligent under- 
standing. 

We do not need, then, to go beyond the first 
century, to find the beginnings of systematic and 
logical discourse in the Christian communities. 
The development of the third and fourth centu- 
ries, the glorious outburst of eloquence which is 
linked with the names of Chrysostom and of the 
clover-leaf of Cappadocia, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, 
and Gregory Nazianzen, was the result of Greek 
rhetoric fused by Christian fervor. But the first 
century marks the beginning of the highest type of 
preaching; the Alexandrine Apollos, avr]p Xdyto?,^ 
1 Acts xviii. 24. 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 71 



is linked with its first tradition, and the great 
Epistles are living witnesses to its early develop- 
ment. The sermon of to-day is not more unlike 
the primitive homily than the great Epistles, the 
Romans and the Hebrews, are unlike the simple 
story of the Gospels on the one hand, and the 
preaching of the prophets on the other. The ser- 
mon, then, whatever its abuses may have been, is 
the natural and just outgrowth of a faith which 
builds upon the Word ; it is not a proof of deca- 
dence, but of normal and necessary development. 

6. The Christian preacher was from the begin- 
ning, and is still, the personal messenger of Jesus 
Christ ; his message was then, and still is, a Gospel 
of joy and hope. I have put these two thoughts 
together, because they cannot rightly be separated ; 
the second follows the first, the first explains the 
second. Out of his relation to his Master the 
preacher's authority must come ; out of the nature 
of his message the joy and hope of his work must 
spring. Only as he holds both features firmly in 
mind and heart, can he find power and grace to 
win men and hold them in the service of his Mas- 
ter. We are ambassadors on behalf of Christ," 
writes St. Paul, and no apostle felt more deeply 
either the dignity or the devotion demanded by his 
task, 'Yttcp XpLo-Tov ovv Trpea-pevofjiev ; mark the loftiness 
of his tone, " as though God were entreating by us," 



72 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS, 



(Ls TOV 6eov irapaKaXovvTO^ St r]jJiu)V ; " we beseecll yOU 

on behalf of Christ," SeofxeOa v-rrlp Xpia-Tov,'^ how ten- 
der the words ! " As the Father hath sent me, even 
so send I you," runs the charter of the Twelve. 
And as Christ sent before His face the seventy dis- 
ciples into every place whither He Himself would 
come, so now He sends each messenger, each min- 
ister, in His place and on His own divine errand. 
No higher authority than this can be asked ; no 
lower authority would be sufficient for the preach- 
er's special work. 

The pulpit is not a platform ; the preacher is not 
a lecturer then. The truth he brings must approve 
itself to reason, but it does not begin with reason. 
He speaks for another, who speaks through him. 
He presses on to apprehend that for which he was 
apprehended by Christ Jesus, el koI KaraXd^o) e^' <S 
Koi KareXyjcjiOrjv vtto XptoTTov 'Irjcrov.^ His whole per- 
sonality is taken into the possession of a higher, a 
divine Person, and sent forth thence with a clear, 
divine message. The conviction of such a posses- 
sion and message is his power. 

The preacher's task, then, is prophetic; he is 
linked in no merely fanciful way with the prophets 
who went before him. His circumstances differ 
widely from theirs, but his spirit has a kindred 
quality, for he too is sent to speak for God to men. 
1 2 Cor. V. 20. 2 Philip, iii. 12. 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



73 



The rough garment and leathern girdle are the 
accidents of the prophet's calling, not its essentials. 
And among the prophets what diversity in incident 
and circumstance I If the remoter figures seem 
very far away, the nearer prophets have points of 
contact and kinshij). If even Elijah was a man 
of like passions with us, of like nature, that is, 
6fjiOLO7ra0i]s rjiJilv^ Jeremiah is a man of like per- 
plexities with us also. And it is significant that 
the life most fully drawn of all in the Old Testa- 
ment is precisely his who comes nearest to our- 
selves, both in the common daylight of his outward 
career, unmixed with miracle, with no strange su- 
pernatural glamour, and also in the varied trials 
and sensitive temper of the life within. For J ere- 
miah shared with us, — 

" those obstinate questionings 
Of sense and outward things, 
Fallings from us, vanishings, 
Blank misgivings of a Creature 
Moving about in worlds not realized; ^ 

and yet Jeremiah too was a prophet, and a prince 
of prophets. And to his age, as to ours, Jeremiah 
could speak with more strength and effectiveness 
than Elijah. To-day also the Word of the Lord 
comes home with nearest helpfulness, not through 
the positiveness of universal because unthinking 
^ Wordsworth, Ode ofi Intimations of Immortality. 



74 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS, 



dogmatism, untouched by life around us, but 
through hearts, sensitive to the doubt and ques- 
tion of our age, that yet have found a divine Pres- 
ence and leading clear and sufficient for their own 
and hence for others' needs. Such a heart alone 
has the authority Epictetus felt in the Stoic sage : 
" He used to talk in such a way that each individual 
one of us who sat there thought some one had been 
telling Euf us about him ; he so put his finger upon 
what we had done, he so set the individual faults 
of each one of us clearly before our eyes." ^ Such a 
heart, above all, commands confidence by the higher 
Power that speaks through his own lips and expe- 
rience, as through Tennyson's teacher and friend : 

" He fought his doubts and gathered strength, 
He would not make his judgment blind, 
He faced the spectres of the mind 
And laid them : thus he came at length 

" To find a stronger faith his own : 

And Power was with him in the night, 
Which makes the darkness and the light. 
And dwells not in tTie light alone, 

But in the darkness and the cloud." ^ 

On the other hand, the preacher's message is 
always one of joy and hope. It was such from the 
beginning ; it is such to-day. No book reveals the 
^ Epictetus, p. 269. ^ In Memoriam, xcvi. 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



75 



dark and serious side of human life with the abso- 
lute clearness, the faithful, undisguised reality, of 
the Xew Testament ; the opening chapters of the 
Romans are lurid with pictiu-es of sin, and gTiilt, 
and misery ; the fifth and eighth chapters of St. 
John's Gospel probe the human conscience to its 
depths. Yet no book is so filled with courage and 
hope as the Xew Testament. The Master, through 
all disheartening circumstance, has His own eyes, 
and those of His disciples, fixed on Satan fallen as 
lightning from heaven ; he sees, and teaches them 
to see, in every phase of sin and suffering a call to 
work the works of God ; the very cross is exulta- 
tion unto Him. In the sombre chapters of the 
Romans even, St. Paul burns with desire to carry 
his Gospel to Rome, assured that there also it will 
prove the power of God unto salvation. And the 
necessity, dvdyKrj, laid upon him in the Corinthians,^ 
woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel," draws 
its force from the gladness of his message ; it is 
like the feeling of the lepers in the deserted camp 
of the Syrians : ^ " this day is a day of good tidings, 
and we hold our peace ; we do not w^ell." The glo- 
rious Gospel in his charge he must give to all the 
world. 

No other spirit befits the preacher to-day ; and 
at this point his task is brighter and more blessed 
1 1 Cor. ix. IG. 2 2 Kings vii. 9. 



76 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



tlian that of Jeremiah and of his fellow prophets. 
Their burden was often of judgment alone, of judg- 
ment unrelieved by hope ; a dark, foreboding 
cloud hangs above their ministry : it is, as St. 
Paul said of the Mosaic law, a ministration of 
death. But the Christian preacher's message is 
always of life : all else in his preaching is subordi- 
nate, incidental, to this ; the darkest circumstances 
he views, and sets, in this relief. What a differ- 
ence this involves in the whole color and impres- 
sion of his message may be illustrated from an- 
other field of thought. A few years ago, there ap- 
peared two novels dealing with kindred subjects, 
and with a kindred purpose to be served : " The 
Nether World," by George Gissing, "All Sorts 
and Conditions of Men," by Walter Besant. Both 
moved in the lower strata of London ; both were 
the result of long and faithful observation, and 
both were pronounced by competent judges trust- 
worthy in detail. But the effect produced upon 
the reader was most diverse : one left him in de- 
spondent mood, by the very hopelessness of the 
state of things portrayed ; the other, although 
no less sombre in its picture of the present, 
left the heart still buoyant with the possibilities 
already disclosed, and inspired with desire to help 
towards the realization of a better future. The 
difference lay in the point of view, the dominant. 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 11 



controlling thought. One dwelt on the darker, 
discouraging aspects of the present, the present 
death ; the other looked through these, and empha- 
sized the cheer, the hope, the creative power, of 
life. There are preachers, it must be admitted, 
with whom the emphasis lies on the darker side, 
whose thought and teaching, not by incidence but 
by direction, savor most of death and unto death. 
Their choice of themes, their treatment of every 
theme indeed, the hearer feels depressing, dis- 
heartening ; but such is not the preaching of the 
Gospel, as the Apostles conceived it, as the Master 
designed it, as the very word, cuayyeXt^w, implies. 
No sermon is really successful, no sermon fulfils 
the purpose of preaching, if it leaves any hearer 
either satisfied with himself, or discouraged and 
hopeless for the future. Each sermon should make 
every hearer feel : I ought to be better than I am ; 
I may be better than I am ; and, by the grace of 
God, I will be better than I am. Every preacher 
may well ask himself, before and after each ser- 
mon : Will my words produce, have my words 
produced, to-day this twofold effect, on all, on 
each, of my hearers ? If not, where does my fail- 
ure lie ? Too little truth on the one hand, too little 
love on the other, will explain the defect. a\y]Oeveiv 
iv ayaivrj must be his motto. 

St. Francis de Sales, we are told, used to make 



78 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 

a long pause before beginning his sermon, moving 
his eyes slowly over all his congregation. A canon 
noticed this one day, and asked St. Francis the 
reason. The great preacher answered : ''I salute 
the guardian angels of all my hearers, and I ask 
each one of them to prepare for my words the 
heart he has in charge. I have gained the great- 
est blessings by this practice." ^ Such prayer 
and vision might well prove inspiring ; but what 
deeper earnestness and power should clothe his 
words who feels behind each hearer the loving 
presence of his Master, and who speaks his mes- 
sage as Christ's ambassador in the very hearing of 
his Lord ! In Florence, there is a fresco by Andrea 
del Sarto, which represents the Baptist preach- 
ing by the J ordan. You see the crowds that sit 
and stand before him, hanging upon his word, and 
drinking in his message : you almost feel the truth 
that falls from his impassioned lips. But the secret 
of his power lies beyond the hearers' vision. In the 
far background your eyes and the preacher's also 
behold a kneeling figure, pleading for preacher 
and for his hearers also. In the consciousness of 
that greater Presence the Baptist found his power ; 
in the same consciousness the preacher of to-day 
must speak, if he would realize the true end of 
preaching. 

1 St. Francois de Sales, Modele, 225. 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



II. 

Relation of Homiletics to Logic, Rhetoric, and Eloquence. 

HoMiLETics, we Lave seen, is both an art and a 
science. Christian preaching, which forms its sub- 
ject, has its roots in the Church, the Christian so- 
ciety ; moves in the broad circle of distinctive 
Christian truths ; is set in a conversational key ; 
seeks to instruct and to edify; is early devel- 
oped into systematic and logical discourse. The 
Christian preacher is the personal messenger of 
Jesus Christ; his message is therefore in its es- 
sence a Gospel of hope and joy. 

Now the higher an art is in its nature and its 
product, the more does its perfection depend upon 
the skill and training gained from other allied and 
subordinate arts. The nobler and more complex a 
science is, the more does its mastery demand a 
thorough knowledge of other allied or subordinate 
sciences. Before the painter can work out his own 
conceptions with the large freedom of genius, be- 
fore he can achieve distinction in his chosen field. 



80 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



he must gain both the knowledge of detail and 
practical skill, the training of eye and of hand, to 
follow and obey the motions of imagination and of 
will. And if he turn to landscape, or still life, or 
the human face and form, how much of minuter 
knowledge in his special sphere must be added to 
general truths of color and of tone I Before the 
astronomer can devote himself undisturbed to his 
sublime science, what large and varied knowledge 
he must lay under tribute, and from how many 
special sources must that knowledge be drawn! 
Mathematics, chemistry, physics, with their mani- 
fold divisions, each in turn, must be mastered be- 
fore he can measure the movement, determine the 
substance, weight, and mutual relations, and ana- 
lyze the spectra of sun and of star. 

Both as a science, then, and as an art, how sub- 
tle and how complex is the preacher's task, how 
high in its aim, how broad in its scope ! He has 
the most delicate and difficult of problems to meet, 
and of products to create. He must work convic- 
tion of necessary but often unwelcome truths : he 
must overcome the twofold resistance of native in- 
ertia and sinful habit : he must make the unseen 
stand out clearer and more powerful than the seen ; 
the eternal outweigh the dominant and absorbing 
interest of the temporal : he must sway the feel- 
ings, convince the reason, quicken the conscience, 



LECTURES OX HOMILETICS. 81 

and move the will. And all this he must do witli 
all men and with each man. For such a task what 
larsfe and varied knowled2:e is needed : how wide 
and deep an acquaintance with human life, in its 
outward circumstance, and in its inward motives ; 
what close and faithful study of 

All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
TVhateyer stirs this mortal frame ! " ^ 

As an art, then, homiletics is related to other 
arts ; as a science, it is built upon other sciences ; 
and these relations, these broader, deeper bases, 
must be first considered, if we would understand 
both the scope and the method of the preacher's 
work. These special studies, kindred and fun- 
damental, may be arranged in two groups, the 
formal and the material : those studies, on the 
one hand, which cover the general laws of human 
speech, the science of thought, the arts of expres- 
sion and persuasion ; and those studies, on the other 
hand, which develop the subjects with which the 
preacher deals, the whole range of theological re- 
search, and, especially, the science of Biblical in- 
terpretation. The relation of homiletics to each of 
these groups must now claim our attention : and 
with the first group, the arts of form and expres- 
sion, it is natural to begin. 

^ Coleridge, Love. 
6 



82 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 

A concise and masterly volume on forensic ora- 
tory was published a few months ago by a profes- 
sor of law in Yale University. It is designed to be 
2i manual for advocates, as the title-page af&rms ; 
but the whole of the first part, and the second, 
third, and fourth books of the second part, are 
as applicable to the pulpit as to the bar ; and the 
whole volume will amply repay the preacher's clos- 
est study. Two sentences from Professor Robin- 
son's preface I quote as bearing upon the point we 
have now reached. Seeking for the method in 
which a legal contest ought to be conducted," he 
writes, " I was led to compare the mode of opera- 
tion adopted by advocates who had become noted 
for the celerity and certainty with which they won 
their cases, with the method and the rules pre- 
scribed by writers on the Art of Forensic Oratory, 
especially by Cicero and Quintilian, and became 
satisfied that, whether consciously to themselves 
or not, these advocates pursued that method and 
obeyed those rules." And, again, after defining 
the purpose of his treatise, he adds : " The study 
of Logic, Rhetoric, and Elocution, on a far more 
extensive scale than the limits of this volume per- 
mit, I must strenuously recommend. Nor is there 
a work on Advocacy or on any one of its subordi- 
nate topics, nor any book of Trials, nor any able 
novel, in which the operations of skillful advocates 



LECTURES OX 



HOMILETICS. 



83 



and detectives are described, that lie {{, e,, the 
student) may not profitably read as illustrating 
and applying the rules and methods which this 
manual inculcates and explains." Xot less broad 
and comprehensive is the survey which the preach- 
er's art demands along the kindred lines of logic 
and rhetoric, of oratory and literature. Xot less 
varied and manifold are the sources from which he 
may draw his power to kindle, to convince, and to 
persuade. And not less certain and rigorous are 
the rules which, whether consciously to himself or 
not, the preacher must observe, if he would reach 
the highest results. We must examine, therefore, 
the relation of the preacher's art to the different 
members of this first group of studies. 

1. The preacher should be familiar with the 
broad principles of logic, both deductive and in- 
ductive ; the latter, indeed, however its claim to 
a coordinate place with the former may be disputed, 
is not less important to the thinker and speaker to- 
day. The broad principles, I said : for the minute 
details and mechanism of the art it is of course 
vmnecessary to keep in mind. The multitude of 
moods and figures in the syllogism, together with 
the barbarous jargon devised to distinguish valid 
forms, he may forget with little loss ; the list of 
formal and material fallacies may not remain fresh 
and by name in his recollection ; but the practical 



84 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 

discipline he gathers from the study, and the ex- 
amination he learns to make of specious and seduc- 
tive statements will never lose their usefulness. 
Occasional reference to such books as the Elemen- 
tary Lessons of Jevons and the recent volume of 
the late Professor Minto will not be without ser- 
vice, as a gymnastic for the mind, imparting facil- 
ity and keenness to the powers of discrimination. 
The latter volume may be commended also for its 
constant application of the principles of logic to 
the discovery of current fallacies in popular speech 
and observation. 

The art of logic grew out of dialectic: it was 
devised and developed by Aristotle to meet the 
needs and dangers of conversation as a means of 
instruction and discipline. As homiletics has an 
origin akin to dialectic, logic has here also a kin- 
dred use. The danger in dialectic was that a skil- 
ful questioner would take the conversation entirely 
into his own hands, and carry the other parties 
wherever he would, misled by their answers of yes 
and no, into positions inconsistent or untenable. 
Where all interlocutors are silent, as is the case 
during discourse from the pulpit, there is the 
strongest reason for the speaker to examine care- 
fully his statements and arguments. The preacher 
has no one to answer him, it is often said, hence he 
falls into habits of loose and inconsequent reason- 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 85 



ing, such as the lawyer would find impossible, with 
the insight and trained intelligence of the judge 
above him, and the keen eye of the opposing coun- 
sel to detect and uncover his fallacies. But if he 
has no opponent to speak in his turn and correct 
his errors, the preacher's hearers are a jury in per- 
petual session, each member of which can examine 
his arguments at leisure, and test and weigh their 
worth. Such a jury is more to be respected and 
more to be feared than a jury that sits for the oc- 
casion only, decides the case at once, and straight- 
way dismisses the pleader and his cause from mind. 
Hence, the preacher's interests, no less than his 
honesty and his honor, demand the patient search- 
ing of each hidden premise and conclusion. 
Warmth of feeling, brilliant imagination, and the 
* glow of speech are a poor excuse for statement 
and reasoning that compromise the candor or the 
intelligence of the preacher in the minds of his 
wiser hearers. The evil such preachers do lives 
after them ; and the distrust they create has un- 
happily a wider reach than appears upon the sur- 
face : they discredit the Gospel they preach, and 
loosen its hold on thoughtful men. It is a part of 
a pastor's painful experience to find in his parish 
men of clear and candid minds who have been re- 
pelled from Christian fellowship and thinking by 
preachers of this character. 



86 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 

These evils, it is true, are seldom the result of 
deliberate purpose. Ministers are not mounte- 
banks, or sophists, dishonest jugglers with words 
or thoughts. The difficulty grows out of a habit 
of speaking without patience and study, through 
indolence or lack of training or self-deceit. The 
inner sophist, it has been well said, is our most 
dangerous enemy. Men generally deceive them- 
selves before they deceive others. But it is the 
function of logic to set free from inward errors, 
as well as from misleading voices without ; to an- 
swer and expose the sophist in our hearts, as well 
as the false teachers who disguise the wolf beneath 
the sheep's clothing. The illusions to which we 
are all subject, preachers as well as other men, are 
fourfold in nature and origin, as Francis Bacon 
has taught us. There are illusions of the tribe or 
the race, which we share with all mankind, which 
belong to our common humanity ; illusions of the 
cave, which belong to our individual tempera- 
ment and point of view ; illusions of the market- 
place, which come from conversation and the vul- 
gar prejudice around us ; and illusions of the stage, 
which dazzle our eyes by the splendor of great 
names and the fair show of authority. From all 
these four we need to be delivered. And the idols 
of the cave and the tribe, no less than the idols of 
the market and the stage, inexorable logic, the 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



87 



iconoclast, labors to break in pieces and destroy. 
To clear bis own mind of illusion and self-deceit, 
and to make his teaching commend itself to his 
hearers as candid, intelligent, and just, the preacher 
should seek the aid of logic. In the conflict with 
error and ignorance, homiletics has need of this 
strong, trustworthy, and mail-clad ally. 

2. The preacher should be a master of the prin- 
ciples and of the methods of rhetoric. The origin 
of this art is highly suggestive. It grew up at Syr- 
acuse after the overthrow of Thrasybulus, B. c. 466, 
and the establishment of popular government in Si- 
cily. Democratic exiles, who had been dispossessed 
by the tyrants, put forward their earlier claims 
to lands and other property. In the nature of the 
ease, little direct and documentary evidence could 
be adduced, argument proceeded chiefly by infer- 
ence, and a multitude of details had to be set in a 
natural and effective order. To meet these needs, 
the new art took its rise, " primarily intended to 
help the plain citizen who had to speak before a 
court of law." ^ The founder, Corax, laid down 
rules for arrangement and divided the speech into 
four parts : the proem, or introduction ; the narra- 
tive, or statement ; the arguments, ayiove^ ; the 
subsidiary remarks, 7rapiK/3a(TL<; ; and the peroration. 
He further brought forward and illustrated the 
1 Cf. Encycl. Brit. PJiet. R. C. Jebb. 



88 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



place and use of probability, ct/<o?, and pointed out 
the fallacy of confounding its abstract and particu- 
lar forms. Persuasion, then, was the purpose of 
rhetoric from its very beginning ; and such is its 
function still. Through all its diverse methods, 
this common purpose runs and reigns. To this 
end all faculties of the mind are addressed in 
turn. 

Rhetoric may be defined, then, as Dr. Campbell 
defines eloquence, as " that art or talent (rixv-fj or 
Svi/afjiii) by which the discourse is adapted to its 
end." Quintilian's definition is to the same effect : 
Dicere secundum virtutem orationis^ scientia bene 
dicendi. But the dictum of Francis Bacon, al- 
though weighty, is too narrow. "The duty and 
office of Rhetoric," he writes, is to apply Reason 
to Imagination for the better moving of the will ; " 
the relation of rhetoric to the feelings, you notice, 
is here passed over, — a serious omission. What, 
then, is the end of discourse, to which rhetoric is 
directed ? The ends of speaking. Dr. Campbell 
tells us, are four : " every speech being intended to 
enlighten the understanding, to please the imagina- 
tion, to move the passions, or to influence the will." 
But with speech of the more serious kind, with 
speech as it falls within our province especially, 
there is but one real end, the last of the four, 
"to influence the will;" the other three are not 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 89 



coordinate, but subordinate and subsidiary to this. 
Cicero combines these three under two heads and 
makes both lead up to the great end : Optimus est 
orator qui dicendo aiiimos audientium et docet et 
delectat et permovet. 

But the finest distinction between Logic and 
Rhetoric, and by far the most striking definition 
of Rhetoric also, is ascribed by Cicero and by Sex- 
tus Empiricus to Zeno the Stoic. Logic he likens 
to the clenched fist ; rhetoric to the open hand. 
Each writer adds the explanation which Zeno gave 
to his own figure, and I therefore transcribe the 
language of both. Zeiioiiis est^ inquavi^ hoc Stoici^ 
— writes Cicero, — omnera vim loquendi^ ut jam 
ante Aristoteles^ in duas trihutam esse partes, : RJie- 
toricam^ palmce ; Dialecticam^ pugni similem esse 
dicebat^ quod latius loquerentur rhetores^ dialectici 
autum compressius} The figure was a favorite with 
Zeno, and he used it also to describe the successive 
degrees or modes of apprehending truth, visus as- 
sensus^ comprehension scientia^ being denoted by 
the compression of the hand in different degrees. 
JSt hoc quidem Zeno gestu conjiciebat. Nam quum 
extensis digitis adversam mannm ostenderat^ visum 
inquiebat hujusmodi est. Deinde quum paullum 
digitos constrirvxerat^ assensus hujusmodi. Tum 
quum plane compresserat pugnumque fecerat^ com- 
1 Cic. De Fin. ii. G, 17. 



90 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



2?rehensionem illam esse dicehat. Qua ex similitU' 
dine etiam nomen ei rei^ quod ante non fuerat^ 
KaTdXrjij/Lv imp suit. Quum antem Icevam manum 
admoverat^ et ilium pugnum arete vehementerque 
eompresserat^ scientiam talem esse dicehat} The 
explanation is given by Sextus in flowing Greek : 

TiYjVQiV 6 Kltt€vs IpoiTrjOeis otcd Siacf)€p€L StaXeKTLKr] prjrop- 
LKrjs, avo-Tpiij/aq rrjv X^^P^ '^^^ ttoXlv i^airXwcras €<prj, 
TOvr(j), Kara fiev rrjv crvcrrpocjyrjv to crrpoyyvXov kol fSpa^^y 
T^s StaXeKTLKrjs Tarroyv iSloj/Jia, 8ta Se r^s efaTrXwcrcws koL 
iKTOLcreijJS tojv SaKTvXiDV to irXarv Tr]<; prjTopiKYj^ 8vva/xe(09 

alvLTTOfjievog, The clenched fist and the open hand ! 
The difference, it will be seen, goes deeper than the 
style, the language alone : it affects the whole man- 
ner of address, and the very spirit of the speaker 
as he approaches his hearers. The clenched fist 
means compulsion, and compulsion, whether physi- 
cal or intellectual, always creates repugnance to- 
ward opinions, and antagonism toward persons. 
Such a speaker, even when he carries conviction, 
loses the fairest fruit of victory : he leaves resent- 
ment rankling in the breast of the vanquished. In 
Butler's often misquoted lines, — 

" He that complies against his will 
Is of his own opinion still ; 
Which he may adhere to, yet disown, 
For reasons to himself best known." 



1 Cic. Acad. Pr. ii. 47, 146. 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 91 

Logic alone, at its best, can only smite down, and 
overpower ; it cannot win. But the open, friendly 
hand of rhetoric means persuasion : it invites, al- 
lures, and welcomes ; it makes a smoother, easier 
path toward conviction, and when conviction is 
gained adds the interest of pleasure and delight 
to the movement of the will. The old fable of the 
sun and the wind, each striving in turn to make 
the traveller open or lay aside his cloak, points to 
the same difference in method. In our day at 
least, and especially among preachers, this differ- 
ence should be carefully borne in mind ; the meas- 
ure of usefulness will depend in large degree upon 
clear discernment of the signs of the times at this 
point. No age, perhaps, has been so impatient of 
all dictation as our own, none more sensitive to 
the slightest outward assertion or assumption of 
authority : it cannot be driven, it must be drawn ; 
but none surely has been so open to persuasion, so 
ready to lend a respectful hearing to words that 
are both reasonable and courteous. By such words 
alone can real conviction, deep and lasting, be won. 
He who adopts the oracular, authoritative, dictato- 
rial air, when he rises before an audience, fails to 
move intelligent men ; he may flog his hearers with 
words, if they are schoolboys in mind, but after 
they have outgrown the rod, and put away childish 
thoughts and things, his method will no longer 
serve. 



92 ^ LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 

Homiletics, then, is not a mere branch, or spe- 
cies, of rhetoric, as it has sometimes been called ; 
such a definition is too narrow. But rhetoric is a 
fundamental and important element in the preach- 
er's work. Homiletics, upon one side at least, is 
rhetoric with a special purpose to govern its appli- 
cation, and direct its use. A wide and thorough 
knowledge of the elements and properties of style, 
of purity in diction, of clearness, force, and ele- 
gance in the choice of words, of just arrangement 
in marshalling and massing ideas, of the power of 
apt and striking figures to illumine and enliven 
thought, with whatever else adds charm and color, 
effect and impressiveness, to human speech, — all 
this, it is the function of rhetoric to impart. All 
the subtle but legitimate methods men may take to 
enliohten the understanding, to quicken the im- 
agination, to stir the feelings, and thus to move 
the will, of their fellow-men, should be covered by 
the preacher's training. The means that others 
all around him use for narrow, selfish, worldly ends, 
he must learn to use, with no less diligence and 
patience surely, for the larger, holier, unworldly 
ends of his ministry. In this respect at least, the 
children of this world must not be wiser in their 
generation than the children of light. 

3. The preacher must study the masters of pub- 
lic speech, both the living and the dead, in other 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 93 

tongiies and in other callings, and in his own. Elo- 
quence is rhetoric applied, illustrated, informed 
with life. Brevissima via per exempla^ example 
is better than precept, as the Latin adage teaches 
us, because it is at once clearer, easier, and more 
persuasive. Its effects are gained in large meas- 
ure, not through actual and deliberate copying, 
but through unconscious and continual imitation. 
Habits of speech and the formation of style, espe- 
cially, are subject to these subtle and unconscious 
influences. In these directions we are all affected, 
slowly and insensibly, but deeply, permanently, 
and from our earliest intelligence, by the strength 
of our associations. The child takes his language, 
his words and his idiom alike, from the servants in 
the house, and later from the children on the play- 
ground and in the streets, far more than from the 
teaching in the schools. There are few public 
speakers who do not at times, by word or phrase, in 
meaning or in pronunciation, betray the effect of 
these early surroundings. It is significant from 
the intellectual no less than from- the spiritual 
point of view that the great preachers of the early 
Church, Basil and the Gregories, Chrysostom and 
Augustine, were all trained from infancy by careful 
and gifted mothers. 

In later and more reflective years also, these sub- 
tle, unconscious influences have an importance not 



94 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 

to be overlooked. We are all subject to the daily 
and demoralizing effect of popular usage. The 
newspaper is the channel through which whatever 
is low and coarse, meaningless and indiscriminate, 
barren and brutal, in the language of the streets, 
finds its way into our homes and into our minds. 
But the newspaper cannot be escaped; we must 
read it in part at least. With all its defects, in 
manners and in morals, and despite its evident and 
growing deterioration, it has become a necessity to 
him who would follow the course of events and 
know what thoughts are in the minds of his fellow- 
men to-day. Like the physician, the preacher can- 
not flee from contagion, and his only safety lies 
in recognizing his danger, and taking precautions 
against the insidiousness of disease. 

On the other hand, the preacher is beset as a 
student by an opposite danger. Other languages 
besides his own, especially the German, he must 
use for purposes of study and research. And this 
necessity, where matter counts for everything and 
manner for nothing, tends to make him oblivious 
to differences of idiom and usage, and insensible 
to the finer qualities of his native tongue, and pro- 
duces that careless or pedantic, but always awk- 
ward and hybrid style, which disfigures so many 
of our books and magazines of the higher class. 
This subtle influence, also, the speaker must not 
overlook. 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 95 

Neither of these dangers can be met by direct 
attack. Botli must be approached and turned 
aside by indirection. Another set of influences, 
as subtle, as gradual, as pervasive, must be brought 
in play, if evil is to be overcome with good. And 
for this purpose, the direct and diligent study of 
form and expression needs to be supplemented by 
that unconscious influence which comes from inti- 
mate and daily familiarity with the acknowledged 
masterpieces of thought and language. To walk 
with the vrise, the proverb tells us, is to gather 
something of their wisdom. And to find and feel 
for ourselves the charm of fitting and eloquent 
speech is to cultivate a wholesome distaste for all 
that is coarse and commonplace, crude and unfin- 
ished in expression ; it is to imitate, almost uncon- 
sciously, the manner of those with whom we thus 
associate, to take delight ourselves in what Lowell 
calls " the habitual full dress of the well - bred 
mind." Or, to change the figure and carry out the 
comparison already used, great thoughts expressed 
in choice and memorable words, familiar by fre- 
quent repetition, will penetrate and fill the mind, 
and serve as a prophylactic against the contagion 
of popular and of pedantic speech, against hybrid 
English and the English of the newspapers. 

But these results, it may be said, will follow 
from familiarity with any pure and classic English, 



96 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS, 



with speech or essay, with poetry or prose. There 
are other advantages, however, which the speaker 
can gain only from the study of speech in its varied 
forms. Every one has noticed and felt the differ- 
ence between the spoken and the written style, 
although few, it may be, could define the differ- 
ence, or tell in what it consists. For the public 
speaker, it is most important that this difference be 
carefully analyzed and thoroughly understood. 

The written style, then, addresses the mind 
through the eye alone : the impression which it 
seeks to produce, and upon which it relies, may be 
formed slowly and at leisure, and renewed, cor- 
rected, repeated, and enlarged whenever the reader 
desires. There is room, therefore, for delicate and 
subtle thought, — for thought that requires time 
and patient effort before it can be grasped in full. 
Such qualities, indeed, if only a fair meaning be 
apparent at the outset, allure the reader, and lead 
him back to frequent study and to ever new de- 
light : they give to prose a part of the depth and 
charm of poetry. The construction, also, may be 
complex and intricate : the eye takes in all the 
clauses of a sentence at a single glance, and readily 
discerns the relation of one to another, of each 
to the whole. Abrupt and sudden changes are 
avoided, softened down, or smoothed away ; con- 
nectives are frequent and varied, imbedded often 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 97 

within the clause, not standing at its beginning ; 
transitions are uniformly made as gentle and grad- 
ual as possible. Such is written style at its high- 
est and its best, as the masters of literature, from 
Plato downward, have used it. 

The spoken style, on the other hand, reaches the 
mind through the ear, and, so far as words are 
concerned, through the ear alone. The play of 
thought and feeling across the speaker's face, the 
light and glow and life that pass from his eyes to 
the eyes and hearts of his hearers, all these give 
expression and emphasis, but they cannot give dis- 
tinctness, definiteness, to his utterance ; his thought 
can only become intelligible through his words, his 
words through the ear alone. The impression 
which he seeks to produce, and upon which alone 
he can rely, must be made d\tn seul jet^ as a 
whole and in all its parts at once. It cannot be 
retouched, corrected, enlarged ; it can be repeated 
and renewed only by the imperfect and uncertain 
aid of memory. The thought to be expressed, 
then, must be given forth with strength and mass : 
it must stand out in firm lines and bold relief. It 
may be profound, suggestive, far reaching: it must 
not be too delicate, over subtle, fine drawn. Con- 
structions, also, must be simple, straightforward, 
easy to grasp. Long sentences may take their 
turn with the short, but the longest must not be 
7 



98 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



complex or involved, but composed of parts dis- 
t nctly articulated and connected in natural order ; 
each sentence so plain, in fact, that wayfaring 
men, though fools, shall not err therein. Transi- 
tions should be obvious ; successive points must be 
made sharp and striking : truths that are meant 
to be held in memory must be enforced by repeti- 
tion, or recapitulated in other words. Such is the 
spoken style, at its highest and its best, as the 
masters of assemblies have used it from Demos- 
thenes downward. It differs from the written 
style at every turn, but all these differences fall 
under three particulars, — directness, point, and 
force. 

Now the preacher is a public speaker, and as 
such his style should be the spoken style. Differ- 
ent methods of delivery are not under our present 
consideration : the emphasis lies here upon the 
effect which the sermon should produce ; whether 
it be read, or recited, or uttered without notes, the 
style should be the same. He who writes his ser- 
mons has greater need to cultivate this spoken 
quality than he who speaks. But the preacher's 
studies make him familiar chiefly with the written 
style : the books he reads both in his special de- 
partment and in general literature are all of this 
class : his own style is from day to day insensibly 
framed after these models. To counteract, then. 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



99 



or better, to supplement, this influence, lie should 
study the masters of public speech. If he is famil- 
iar with other languages, whether classic or mod- 
ern tongues, he will find it an advantage to read 
the best of orators aloud to train his ear, and then 
to put their thought in English words, gaining 
thereby facility and fitness in speech. In Greek, 
let him dwell upon Demosthenes, until he feels the 
orator's variety and fineness and force, in the lim- 
pid clearness of narration, in point and brevity of 
reasoning, in close persuasiveness of appeal. Then 
let him try to reproduce the same effects in terse 
and vigorous and varied English. The Oration on 
the Crown he read at college, at sundry times and 
in divers manners, cut up in daily portions : now let 
him master the great oration as a v^hole, that he 
may follow its movement, feel its passion, and catch 
its tone. The time it takes, the labor it costs, are 
both well spent ; no written words make clearer the 
secret of the spoken style. 

Among the masters of modern speech, France 
offers her orators of the Revolution, each charac- 
terized by Castelar in striking figure : ^ Mira- 
beau, la tempestad de ideas ; Vergniaud, la melo- 
dia de la palabra ; Danton, el fuego, la ardiente 
lava del espiritu; Camilo, el inmortal Camilo, 
eterno, sublime niiio escapado de Atenas, con cin- 
^ Discursos Parliamentairos, iii. 127. 



100 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 

eel en vez de pluma, especie de bajo relieve del 
Partenon, viviente, animado." Spain points to 
Castelar himself, somewhat florid to our northern 
taste, but rich in historic allusion and political 
insight, and eloquent with the mingled majesty 
and music of the Castilian tongue. I never lack 
for a word, — Pitt never lacks for the word," is 
the discriminating tribute ascribed to Pitt's older 
rival. Fox. The secret of Pitt's happier choice of 
words, as ready but more exact, lies in large meas- 
ure in his early habit of translation from the clas- 
sics. There was scarcely a Greek or Latin classi- 
cal writer of any eminence, his tutor tells us, the 
whole of whose works Pitt had not read before 
the age of twenty. " His mode of translating the 
classics to his tutor," writes a biographer, ''was a 
peculiar one. He did not construe an author in 
the ordinary way, but after reading a passage of 
some length in the original, he turned it at once 
into regular English sentences, aiming to give the 
ideas with great exactness, and to express himself 
at the same time with idiomatic accuracy and ease. 
Such a course was admirably adapted to the for- 
mation of an English style, distinguished at once 
for copiousness, force, and elegance. To this early 
training Mr. Pitt always ascribed his extraordinary 
command of language, which enabled him to give 
every idea its most felicitous expression, and to 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 101 



pour out an unbroken stream of thought, hour 
after hour, without once hesitating for a word, or 
recalling a phrase, or sinking for a moment into 
looseness or inaccuracy in the structure of his sen- 
tences." ^ This single instance, this long but per- 
tinent quotation, must suffice upon this point. But 
it would be easy to multiply instances to show how 
large a place the practice of translation has had in 
the training of skilful speakers, from Cicero, who 
followed the Greek orators with close and constant 
study, to Lord Mansfield, who confesses that while 
a student at Oxford he rendered all the orations of 
Cicero into written English, and then, after an in- 
terval, retranslated his English into Latin. Some 
other langaiage than his own, either classic or mod- 
ern, almost every student of to-day has learned ; 
there is no reason then w^hy he should not make 
this knowledge tributary to his training as a 
speaker, with the light of example before him. 

If the English language, however, confines the 
preacher's choice, how wide a field still opens be- 
fore him from which he may select ! No modern 
tongue contains so rich and varied stores of elo- 
quence as our own. The platform and the bar the 
student may lay under tribute, no less than the 
pulpit. Orators of other generations he may com- 
pare with profit with orators of his own. Differ- 
^ British Eloquence, 552. 



102 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



ences in style will teach him much by very contrast. 
His own defects of temperament and gift he may 
remedy by careful choice of models. If he lacks 
imagination, warmth, fire, let him learn to kindle 
at Chatham's flame. If, on the other hand, his 
feelings are sensitive and easily stirred, but his 
language loose, his logic defective, and his thought 
incoherent, let him turn to Erskine, the earliest 
master of the modern style in speaking, whom a 
competent authority recently pronounced the most 
important of English orators for students of Eng- 
lish law. Whatever his own native gifts or defects 
may be, no speaker can afford to neglect Edmund 
Burke, who alone among orators, by the power and 
scope of his mind, and by the wealth of his wisdom 
and suggestiveness, reminds one of Shakespeare. 
" He is the only man," said Johnson, "whose com- 
mon conversation corresponds with the general 
fame which he has in the world. No man of sense 
could meet Burke by accident under a gateway to 
avoid a shower without being convinced that he 
was the first man in England." The speech on 
Conciliation with America, especially, less exuber- 
ant and "Asiatic" than others of his speeches, 
which Sir James Mackintosh regards as " the most 
faultless of Mr. Burke's productions," by the logi- 
cal order of its thought and the masterly grouping 
of historic detail, deserves hardly less attentive 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS, 103 



study than the Oration on the Crown. Modern 
speakers must not be forgotten for the old, and in 
the England of our own age Cobden will teach 
the student to use his mother tongue in a man- 
ner simple, straightforward, matter-of-fact : " You 
know I never give any peroration to my speeches," 
he said, " when I have finished, I sit down : " ^ while 
John Bright affords illustration of all varieties of 
modern speech, the imaginative, the passionate, the 
distinct appeal to reason, all built up on the plain- 
est, homeliest idiom which the language makes 
possible, and which a Quaker training could im- 
part. In our own country, it is enough to mention 
Webster for w^eight and majesty, and Wendell 
Phillips for a matchless blending of simplicity and 
variety, of force and grace. 

Least of all can the great preachers be neglected 
by any preacher who rightly values his lofty call- 
ing. " I never read sermons," is the confession 
that comes too often from the lips of ministers to- 
day, a confession put forward with something of 
conscious pride, as if the statement were enough to 
prove the speaker's personal genius and original- 
ity. A similar confession would hardly be made 
in other callings. Great arguments at the bar, 
judicial decisions of the bench, are carefully and 
minutely studied by lawyers and by judges of dis- 
^ Cobden, Speeches, p. 478. 



104 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 

tinction ; and studied, not for tlieir substance 
alone, but for manner, for the language in which 
the thought is clothed. The masters of public 
speech in every department have followed the ut- 
terances of their predecessors and their contempo- 
raries with the minutest and most patient care. 
Eead the lives of those preachers whose words 
have sunk the deepest, who have left lasting effects 
in the minds and hearts of men, and you will find 
they never despised a kindred training. In preach- 
ing, as in every creative art, analysis must be mas- 
tered before synthesis : you must be able to take 
sermon or speech apart, before you can put the 
parts together with justice and effect. And this 
power to analyze finds its best development and 
discipline, not in our own imperfect work, but in 
the finished w^ork of the masters of speech. To 
follow the processes by w^liich great preachers 
achieve tlieir results, with close attention to each 
detail, to order, form, and phrase, is to gain facil- 
ity and freedom in the working of our own minds, 
is to develop our own creative power. 

Nor can the unconscious influence of this famil- 
iarity with the great preachers be overestimated. 
In the sermons of some men the note of provin- 
cialism is always painfully prominent : whatever 
they touch, their tone, their language, their thought, 
are all of narrowest tyi3e : they remind you, it 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



105 



is well said, of the conversation of those people 
who have never been out of their native village : 
they need to be broadened by contact with the 
larger world. Xow, to know the great preachers 
of every age and communion is to lift the mind to 
a broader as well as higher level ; it is to break 
down provincial barriers, and give the vision and 
freedom of the whole truth. Even the truths we 
already know and love, also, gain new effect, as 
these studies teach us new methods of approach, 
illustration, and appeal. The very association of 
the untrained, undeveloped mind, ^ith minds of 
larger grasp and poise, and perfect discipline, is it- 
self an education : it makes our own thought more 
vigorous and sustained in movement : it gives a 
tone, a pace unto our minds : it cultivates in lan- 
guage even a finer choice, a subtler sense of differ- 
ence and of proj^ortion, a delicate precision on the 
one hand, and on the other a wider range. 

The preacher cannot make his choice too wide 
in this direction. The wealth of imagery and color 
in Jeremy Taylor, " the Shakespeare of divines," 
as Emerson calls him ; the simple but majestic 
rhythm of Hooker ; the point and vigor of South ; 
the loo'ic and learnino- of Barrow : the naturalness 
and ease of Tillotson, — all have their lessons to 
teach, their unconscious influence to impart. The 
masters of the French pulpit will cultivate his 



106 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 



sense of form and order, of progress and precision 
in his movement : not simply the preachers of the 
conrt of Louis XIV., Massillon, Bourdaloue, Bos- 
suet : but those of later times and of our own, La- 
cordaire, Eavignan, Monsabre, and the present 
preacher of Notre Dame, D'Hulst : among Protest- 
ants, from the earlier days, Saurin ; from our own 
times, Colani, Babut, Decoppet, and Bersier, the 
last of whom by virtue of his training in our own 
country awakens larger interest, and stands nearer 
us in his mode of thought. 

The English pulpit of to-day by its very wealth 
embarrasses the choice. No century compares with 
this in the quality of English preaching at its best. 
There is certainly no sign of decadence here. Each 
communion has its men of light and leading, its 
voices not echoes, its masters of thouo-ht and form. 
The Unitarians point to the calm and philosophic 
power of Martineau, the deep, spiritual insight of 
Thom, the practical religious teaching of Beard. 
The Independents are well represented by Princi- 
pal Fairbairn, who needs no introduction here, and 
by Dale, whom it would be hardly too much to call 
the greatest of living preachers. Maclaren, among 
the Baptists, has created a special tj^pe of exposi- 
tion. The Church of England counts Liddon her 
preacher to intelligence and the reason, and Knox 
Little her type of fervid evangelism ; while the 



LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 107 



Bishop of Eipoii, Carpenter, and the late Arch- 
bishop of York, Magee, take highest rank as 
preachers without notes, the last, perhaps the finest 
type of that method of delivery which our age and 
our language afford. Yet an eagle's flight above 
all the rest must be placed the three great names 
of Newman, Manning, and Church : Newman, so 
rich in color and imagery and varied power ; Man- 
ning, the keenest analyst of sin, the most direct of 
preachers to the conscience ; and Church, w hose 
calm and thoughtful treatment of lofty themes lifts 
the hearer into a purer atmosphere, 

" Where, beyond these voices, there is peace." 

The words in w^hich Principal Shairp sets forth 
the qualities of Newman's Parochial Sermons 
might better be applied to the blended powder of 
these three names : so simple and transparent," 
he writes, yet so subtle withal ; so strong, yet so 
tender; the grasp of a strong man's hand, com- 
bined with the trembling tenderness of a woman's 
heart, expressing in a few monosyllables truth 
which would have cost other men a page of philo- 
sophic verbiage, laying the most gentle yet persua- 
sive finger on the very core of things, reading to 
men their own most secret thoughts better than they 
knew them themselves." ^ If other preachers profit 
us by individual qualities of outline and form, these 
1 Aspects of Poetry, 381, 382. 



108 LECTURES ON HOMILETICS. 

surely will bring tlieir best fruit into our lives, 
when we have caught their tone and spirit through 
long and close association and daily familiarity. 
They must be studied as the poets are studied, 
with patient care and meditation. But the effect 
is worthy of the cost. For no preacher who walks 
each day in such companionship, who breathes this 
air indeed, can let his own style sink to the coarse 
and vulgar level of the streets, or become the slave 
of sensationalism or pedantry in the pulpit. 

With the preachers of our own country you are 
more or less familiar. They have their lessons to 
teach, some of them nearer to our special work 
than we can learn from preachers more remote in 
time and place. But none of them, with all fair- 
ness it must be added, disclose those finer qualities 
which the English pulpit at its best reveals. The 
sturdy manhood and spiritual suggestiveness of 
Bushnell, the rush and force and rhythmic flow^ of 
Brooks, the many-sided practical insight of Beecher, 
all are worth our study. The latter, I must con- 
fess, little as he can teach in form, for variety and 
for homely truth to common life surpasses all. No 
single sermon fails to have its special portion, re- 
mark, or anecdote, or keen interpretation, for each 
special class the preacher sees before him. To 
each he gives some morsel of the bread of life, and 
to this adaptation in his teaching, rather than to 
any brilliant gift, his power is due. 



LECTURES OS HOMILETICS. 109 



To study eaeli j^r^aclier. then, for his special gift, 
and at his best ; to supplement the defects of one 
by the excellences of another ; to gather from all a 
clearer idea of effective form and presentation in 
the preacher's message, and frame a larger ideal of 
what the man behind the words should be. — these 
are the objects which the student of homiletics sets 
before him, as he turns to study the masters of the 
pulpit. Xo slavish imitation, no copying of a con- 
scious model, is possible to liim whose mind is open 
to many types of excellence. And the higher the 
masters whom he follows most, the more will he be 
lifted above formal imitation to the sharing of a 
kindred spirit. 

The list of preachers I have named is long ; but 
it is not exhaustive. I have mentioned only those, 
and but a part of those even, to whom I owe a per- 
sonal debt for power and inspiration, who have 
been of help to me in a preacher's life. A few 
hints of this character I should have prized when 
my pastorate began : I make these hints to-day, in 
the hope they may prove helpful to others as they 
begin to preach. There is material for a lifetime's 
study here : but half an hour a day given to special 
work like this will soon give any man a feeling, an 
instinct, for spoken style, free him from the undue 
influence of written forms, and enlarge his use of 
his mother tongue. 



SERMONS.i 



I. 

"CALLED TO BE SAINTS." 

" Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the 
will of God, and Sosthenes our brother, 

" Unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them 
that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints." — 
1 Corinthians i. 1, 2. 

" Paul, called to be an apostle ; " ' them that 
are at Corinth called to be saints.' These are the 
two clauses which I wish to separate from those we 
have read, in order to fix your attention on them 
this morning. I fear the first impression on our 
minds as we put these clauses together is of con- 
trast. " Called to be an apostle " ! We have a 
very large idea of what that means. " Called to 
be a saint " ! We have a very poor and small idea 
of that, as shown in our conduct. Yet I am very 
sure that the thought of the Apostle here is not of 
contrast, but of closest parallelism. He sets the 
two side by side as if they were on the same level. 
Paul was not the man to parade, uncalled for, his 
points of superiority over others. Sometimes, in 
1 Reproduced from imperfect stenographer's notes. 



SERMOyS. 



Ill 



this epistle notably, he is driven to recall the dis- 
tinguishing marks of his apostleship, not for him- 
self alone, but for the sake of the churches he has 
founded, to set them on a level with the early Jew- 
ish churches. This is never his choice. He loved 
rather, with all great souls, to dwell on what was 
common to him and those whom he addressed. It 
is a mark of littleness — shows a mind essentially 
small, and a temper contemptible — to put self on 
a pedestal before our fellows, and challenge their 
admiration for what we have and they cannot gain, 
and forget our vast distance from the divine ideal. 
The hio-hest o-enius is here at one with the highest 
goodness. It loves to emphasize what it holds in 
common with all men, — what all men may have, 
and ought to have. Called to be an apostle,*' 
" called to be saints I This is the common thought 
which rings and reechoes through the epistle. Its 
refrain, T\'e are called,'* blends the clauses of the 
text, and binds together the hearts of the Apostle 
and his hearers, and with theirs our own, bringing 
to each of us, if we will realize it, the same hope, 
and duty, and divine warning. 

1. ''Called to be saints."' This is the clause on 
which we will chiefly dwell, because we do not need 
to dwell on the earlier clause. Xo one of us has 
any question as to Paul's claim that he was ** called 
to be an apostle." But it seemed then, even to 



112 



SERMONS. 



some of his own converts, to be extravagant, while 
the Jewish Christians all over the world were dis- 
posed to set him lower than the Twelve. This very 
epistle was written largely to maintain his equal 
right and dignity with his fellow apostles. But all 
dispute on this point is past. The world has heard 
him, and he has so far moulded the Christianity of 
the Western World, — Christianity as we know it, 
and as the last ten centuries have known it, — that 
it is difficult for us to lift the other apostles, even 
Peter, James, and John, up to the level of Paul. 

So we do not need to emphasize the fact that he 
was called to be an apostle, but we do need to em- 
phasize the fact that everybody is called to be a 
saints and that everyhody is called to be a saint. 
We do not very often think of ourselves as called 
to be anything, still less saints, yet this is what 
Paul insists upon. Hence we must study closely 
what the Apostle means, how he uses the title, and 
so what force it should have for us. 

1. Let us see how widely he uses the phrase. It 
is not the Corinthians alone who are so addressed. 
Turn to the opening of the Epistle to the Romans, 
Paul called to be an apostle, ... to all that be in 
Rome . . . called to be saints." As these epistles 
were written near the same time, we do not wonder 
at the kindred thought. Take, then, the later epis- 
tles, the three great epistles of " The Prison House 



SERMONS. 



113 



at Rome," — Epliesians, Philippians, Colossians, — 
and you find the same phrase, — "the saints which 
are at Ephesus," Philippi, or Colosse. There is 
indeed a noteworthy change in the form of this 
address from that in the earlier epistles. There he 
addresses the church, or the churches of a locality, 
but here the saints : as if the more he has grown 
in mind, the more he has come to see three things ; 
first, that the holiness of the church is nothing more 
than the holiness of the members who make it up ; 
secondly, that a " saint " is what every individual 
is called and meant by God to be ; and lastly, that 
the highest help, the first service, he can render 
any little gathering of Christians, is to keep this 
truth before their minds, first, last, and all the time. 
So, again and again, as he writes to different 
churches, he begins with the same supreme ideal 
of their lives. We hardly need say that through 
each epistle runs the same line of argument. He 
presses home the truth on all occasions, in all cir- 
cumstances, relates it to all duties. Whenever he 
writes to any company of Christians, he writes to 
them as if they were saints, and calls them such. 

2. Now when we turn to the character of the 
people who made up these early churches, we do 
not find them to be saints in the sense we give to 
the word. The use of the phrase is not accounted 
for by their native qualities or present attainments. 
8 



114 



SERMONS, 



Many of them had been drawn from the class of 
slaves, the most corrupt in the Roman State, steeped 
in vice, tainted with all manner of sins. How often 
we notice, after a catalogue of crimes prevalent in 
that day, that the Apostle adds, " and such were 
some of you" ! This he does only to mark the con- 
trast between the past and the present. Yet even 
now they do not show as ideal saints. We see 
them quarrelsome, divided into factions, with little 
unity of spirit : their meetings were sometimes 
boisterous, their sacred feasts stained with pride, 
jealousy, selfishness. The Apostle is here writing 
expressly to condemn a flagrant case of crime in 
the very church, whose members he addresses as 

saints." We feel, as we rise from reading his 
epistle, that the term would have to be taken with 
a great latitude of meaning, before we could apply 
it to people who make up such a gathering as this. 

3. Yet, notice, in the third place, that there is 
no lowering of the ideal of what a saint should be 
or of what a calling is. Both words have for Paul 
a profound meaning. 

a. A " saint " with him is the highest possible 
ideal of humanity. There are few sadder things in 
the history of Christianity than the way in which 
this great word, which shines out in the pages of 
the New Testament, has been dwarfed and dimmed. 
I turn to mediaeval history, to the language of the 



SERMONS, 



115 



great writer who has died within two years, and 
find a saint, a man who is ascetic, sour-visaged, 
fasting, who goes through the world fighting, and 
for himself alone. I turn to Puritanism, and read 
it in the letters of Oliver Cromwell and the men 
who made his staff and officers, and here is another 
type of saint just as narrow-minded, with an added 
touch of cant, from which the mediaeval saint was 
free ; and then I open the New Testament and say. 
Does the word mean such a pitiful being, instead 
of the kind of man Paul conceives ? Under these 
two classes of saints noble lives have been lived. 
It is a fact of Christianity that multitudes of men 
are better than their belief, and higher than their 
professed ideal. But these later associations with 
the word, mediaeval narrowness and asceticism on 
the one side, Puritan censoriousness and hardness 
on the other, have sadly dwarfed and belittled its 
meaning until it has become alas ! to many ears 
and minds, only a cant term. Brush these aside, 
put off all colored spectacles, and look into the 
New Testament. There you see meet and blend, 
the gentle grace, winsomeness, and charity of a 
Francis Assisi, the personal purity in thought and 
feeling of a Milton, the heroic manhood of a Philip 
Sidney, the large-souled philanthropy, devotion, and 
self-sacrifice that burned and blazed in Xavier. 
That is the kind of saint that the New Testament 



116 



SERMONS. 



holds before you, and I challenge you to find in all 
the wide world of lofty thought, action, and feeling, 
a broader, higher, nobler, type of man or woman 
than this, Paul's " Saint." 

b, "Called," again, is a great word on the lips 
or from the pen of Paul. How he dwelt upon its 
meaning in his own case, when forced to contend 
for the sacred name of Apostle ! How exalted as a 
privilege, it seemed to him, raising him to the level 
of others, even though they had known Christ after 
the flesh as he had not ! " Called " ! it meant that 
road to Damascus, and the dazzling light which 
smote him down ; it meant that before his birth 
God had fashioned him and sent him into the 
world for a divine purpose. And now remember, 
when he says " called to be saints " of his fellow 
disciples, he does not lower that thought. He be- 
lieves as he utters these words and impresses them 
on his hearers that every disciple in Colosse or 
Corinth is just as truly called of God to be a saint 
as he himself is called to be an Apostle. The call- 
ings rest on the same level and basis, have the same 
great object in view, and when complete they reach 
the same divine end. He is no more called to be 
an Apostle than the humblest Christian of his day 
is called to be a saint. 

4. Now, as we think of the greatness of this 
ideal, as we see how much it means, I think we 



SERMONS. 



117 



see why he has put the two clauses together here, 
and why at the beginning of his epistles he delights 
to insist on this great thought, that every disciple 
is called to be a saint. 

a. It explains to him the meaning of the sacri- 
fice of Christ. That had never taken place for any 
lower purpose than this : not to snatch a sinful 
man away from the punishment he deserves, leav- 
ing him stained with the same sin as before, not 
to snatch him from hell, but to lift the soul out of 
that sin and selfishness which is hell, out of those 
temptations which blind his eyes and deafen his 
ears to every divine call, out of the bondage and 
slavery of sin into the glorious liberty of the sons 
of God, — that is the purpose of the Incarnation ! 
Christ came, suffered, died, rose, ascended, that 
you, my brother, might be a saint, and nothing less 
than that was worthy of His comiug. 

6. Then, again, the same thought explains the 
Apostle's own call. Why was he sent out into the 
world with this great message ? Why was he for- 
bidden to go to his own people and sent to the ut- 
termost parts of the known world to bear the mes- 
sage of the cross ? Because, he now sees, they — 
these despised pagans, these races lying in dark- 
ness beneath the contempt of the Jew and the 
Greek — are called to be saints ; because God pur- 
poses to create in these distant races a new type 
of man. 



118 



SERMONS. 



c. Lastly, in this truth Paul was finding the se- 
cret of the new and strange moral force which 
Christianity had brought into the world. He had 
seen in hundreds of his converts the power of this 
truth to reform the life and build up the character. 
If you would make a man something out of no- 
thing, you must do more than menace him with 
whips. Loftier than law is it to put within his 
heart a divine spirit, and set before his eyes a 
higher purpose, and make him feel that he is called 
of God to be and to do something in this world. 
Look at the early history of Christianity. I have 
pointed out the class of people with whom it had 
to deal, the dregs of the Roman State ; but not 
more wonderful was that power which centuries 
before stooped in Egypt to an enslaved people, led 
them through the wilderness, and lifted them into 
a nation, than this moral force of the Christian 
faith, which built up the base material under its 
hand into a new manhood and a new civilization. 
Aye, and within two centuries compelled the admi- 
ration of the haughtiest of Roman philosophers and 
the most hostile of sceptics. Marcus Antoninus 
writes that if it were possible for those of the Stoic 
sect, to which he belonged, to reach the level of the 
despised Christians, there would be hope for the 
future of Stoicism. Julian the apostate, who 
thought that he could sweep from the earth the 



SERMONS, 



119 



Christianity in which he had been cradled, was 
first to confess that not until paganism could reach 
the moral level of Christianity was there any hope 
for paganism. That early church is an eternal 
comment on the power of this call, the " call to be 
saints." 

II. Has the power of such a call passed away 
for us to-day? Has it no message to bring to our 
ears and our lives ? Do we not need to be re- 
minded often of w^hat God expects of us, of what 
Christ means us to become, of the purpose of the 
New Testament and the Gospel as it is sent into 
our lives and into our hearts ? We, too, are 
''called to be saints."- The lesson needs now, as 
of old, to be repeated, kept daily before us, and 
enforced upon our hearts. The words are not 
common enough with us. We must rescue them 
from cant and disgrace, lift them above contro- 
versy, release them from all fetters of narrow in- 
terpretation, and take them home to our hearts. 

1. In the first place, let us remember that the 
call is to every Christian disciple, not to the min- 
ister alone, but to laymen as w^ell. Their call is 
on the same level, from the same source, with the 
same divine certainty and purpose. It used to be 
the fashion to speak of the ministry as " a sacred 
calling." This way of speaking has gone out of 



120 



SERMONS, 



fashion : if because the ministry has lost its sacred- 
ness, then this is a sad thing for the church and 
for the race ; but if we mean that all other callings 
have been brought up to something of the same 
sacredness, then it is a blessing to the world. But 
there still lingers in the hearts of many Christian 
people the idea that the minister is called to some 
level of character which it would be absurd to ex- 
pect of the layman. Did you never see a Christian 
who, in the case of his own character and conduct, 
would allow a thousand things which he would be 
ashamed to have his minister do? Do you find 
any excuse for it in the light of this verse ? If I 
were speaking to a congregation of ministers I 
would say. With your contact with the truth of 
God, you ought to have an ideal character far 
above that of your neighbors, and whatever criti- 
cism they pass upon you, ought only to give you a 
higher idea of what Christ wants you to be. But 
I should fail of my duty as a Christian preacher if I 
did not say to you, that no Christian has any right 
to expect from his minister a higher level of con- 
duct than his own. Your moral vision sees no 
ends too high for you to seek, sets no standards for 
another, even for a minister, that you should not, 
need not, reach. What you feel the minister has 
no right to do, that you have no right to do. 
What you feel unworthy of his calling, that is un- 



SERMONS. 



121 



worthy of yours. You are called to be a saint, lie 
is called to help you to be a saint. The end of 
his calling is found in yours, to which his is but 
the means. He is the tool to help make you a 
saint, and the tool is less than the work j)roduced. 
When God gives you a vision of something bet- 
ter than yourself, or something larger and more 
unselfish than you are to-day, that vision is from 
heaven, and is meant for your guidance. Be not 
disobedient to it. The voice of your conscience 
will never sound too loudly for your own life, nor 
present a higher ideal than God has meant for 
you. 

2. So again the call is for all men, not alone 
for the professing Christian. There are a great 
many people in every congregation who feel and 
see the ideal which a church member should reach, 
and are very severe when Christians fall short of 
their ideal. I make no apology for any Chris- 
tian's defects, but I say to the man who sees what 
the Christian should be. How did you come to see 
it, my brother ? The Xew Testament taught you, 
the Apostle's language shows you, he has painted 
for you the vision of what a saint should be, and 
your own heart says, that is right, and every 
Christian ought to be that. But has God flooded 
your heart with light merely to make you a judge 
of your brother ? Is that the purpose of the 



122 



SERMONS. 



New Testament and of the Incarnation ? No, my 
brother, you are called to be a saint, up to the 
highest measure you can see. God never gave 
you any light which he did not mean you to use in 
your own life. He has put no conscience in your 
breast to make you a circuit judge over some one 
else. You, all of you, are called to be saints. In 
this call Father, Son, and Spirit unite. " The 
Spirit and the Bride say come." The church, 
the preacher, the open word, join in the appeal. 
Would that I might set it ringing forever in your 
hearts, to haunt your life, till it should re-make 
and transform it all — " you are called to be 
saints." 

Remember, then, three final lessons. 

1. We have all a divine purpose behind our 
lives. God calls us, not we ourselves, to be saints. 
He calls us by sending His Son to die for us, and 
His Spirit to breathe within us. He has put us 
here. He has given us this life and light, for this 
end. The utmost that God can do for us, I say it 
reverently, the highest thing he can do for us, is to 
make us in His likeness, and that can only be done 
by the fulfillment of this purpose, the developing 
within our lives of the noblest saintship and the 
largest likeness to His Son. 

2. We have here a divine promise. How much 
this means I He who has begun a good work in 



SERMONS. 



123 



you will not leave it unfinished. Wherever moral 
failure is recorded, God is not the cause. Your 
life is not straitened in Him, but in yourself. 
" Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it." Reach 
out to your whole heritage. You cannot ask too 
much. Remember the word of the Apostle : if 
He gave His Son for us, " how shall He not with 
Him also freely give us all things ? " The greater 
includes the less. His purpose implies the jDromise 
of the grace you need to-day, to-morrow, and the 
next day, until you trample on every sin, and ful- 
fill at last your calling to saintship. 

3. In the last place, the divine warning in the 
verse must be noticed. If there is any failure to 
attain that ideal, it is not God's but yours ; and be 
assured that He can never be content with less and 
that you can never be satisfied with less. You 
were made to be a son of God, and though you 
fill yourself with husks you can never be content 
to be a swine. You were made to be saints, and 
with that light flooding your life, and that ideal 
filling your vision, and that call in your ears, any- 
thing less than that done and realized becomes its 
own condemnation, and when the soul has narrowed 
itself, and forever shut out all divine life and pos- 
sibility, I think no remorse can ring within our 
ears more terrible than these simple words, " Called 
to be saints." 



124 



SERMONS. 



You remember the language of one of our own 
poets, as he describes the soul of the malefactor 
just on the borders of eternity, looking back over 
his life : — 

" Men think it is an awful sight 

To see a soul just set adrift 
On that drear voyage from whose night 

The ominous shadows never lift; 
But 't is more awful to behold 

A helpless infant, newly born, 
Whose little hands unconscious hold 

The keys of darkness and of morn. 

" Mine held them once ; I flung away 

Those keys, that might have open set 
The golden sluices of the day, 

But clutch the keys of darkness yet ; 
I hear the reapers singing go 

Into God's harvest ; I that might 
With them have chosen, here below 

Grope shuddering at the gates of night. 

" O glorious youth that once wast mine ! 
Oh high ideal ! all in vain 
Ye enter at this ruined shrine 

Whence worship ne'er shall rise again; 
The bat and owl inhabit here, 

The snake nests in the altar-stone, 
The sacred vessels moulder near. 
The image of the God is gone." 

J. B. Lowell, Extreme Unction. 



SEEMONS. 



II. 

THE ENIGMA OF LIFE. 
" For uow we see in a mirror darkly." — 1 CoR. xiii. 12. 

Not darkly," but ''in a riddle," as the margin 
of the Revision reads. " In an enigma " is the 
exact translation. The phrase describes, not the 
manner in which we look, but the thing which we 
see. The darkness belongs, not to our vision alone, 
but to the object at which we gaze. Thus the 
clause harmonizes with the rest of the verse, with 
the whole chapter which teaches the relation in 
which we stand to the great world of human life, 
to our own present life, with all the problems 
therein disclosed and forced upon our thought and 
view. 

That our vision here is imperfect and unsatisfy- 
ing, all men confess : in this verse we learn the 
reason for its imperfection. That reason is two- 
fold:— 

1. We see only the reflection, not the reality. 
"In a mirror," says the Apostle, not "face to 
face "; " in part," not as a whole. The object we 
see in a mirror is not the object itself ; it is only 



126 



SERMONS. 



a reflection. No object can be seen thus in its 
completeness. A face or a form presents but a 
single side to the mirror, and that side alone is re- 
flected therein ; of the other side the mirror can- 
not tell us. So in the glass of life, one side, one 
part, alone is seen : the other sides, the other parts, 
which together make the whole, our eyes cannot 
discern. 

2. Again, the figure thus partially reflected is 
dim, obscure, uncertain. " In a mirror, in an 
enigma." The mirrors of the old world were made 
of polished metal. The art of coating glass with 
quicksilver, to produce a perfect reflecting surface, 
was then unknown. In any mirror the reflection 
may be dimmed by mist or moisture, by the very 
breath of the beholder. In the ancient mirror it 
was often distorted also by inequality and refrac- 
tion. So in the glass of life the objects which we 
see, the very side and face which we behold, are re- 
flected in broken and unequal lights. Not only do 
we see in part : the very part does not correspond 
wholly with the reality. 

It is no wonder, then, that a vision so imperfect, 
a knowledge so poor and partial, should be destined 
to pass away, when once the perfect state has 
come, when we see " face to face," and know as 
fully as we are known. Hence the Apostle turns 
from our sight and knowledge, which are but tran- 



SERMONS. 



127 



sitory, to insist on the supremacy of that which can 
never pass, — of faith and hope and love which 
abide forever ; of love above all, which remains for- 
ever the same, unchanged in character, though en- 
larged and deepened in power as we pass from the 
realm of the imperfect and shadowy into the realm 
of clear and everlasting light. Thus is this verse 
linked with the earlier verses of the chapter in this 
noble hymn and eulogy of love. 

But to-day we take this single verse, this single 
phrase, as the subject of our thought. The enigma 
of life ! How familiar the words sound ! How 
full they seem of deep pathos and suggestion ! 
We have all felt — w^ho has not felt ? — the fine 
fitness of the phrase. It applies to our own life 
and experience, to w^hat we know of the life of 
others around us, to the life of all men, to the his- 
tory of the world, with its manifold and perplex- 
ing problems. He feels its meaning most who has 
lived most himself and seen most of human life. 
The figure is as pathetic as it is true. The enigma 
of life I We see the child puzzling over the prob- 
lem or riddle he is set to solve, using all his pow- 
ers to draw some meaninf^r from the seemino- conf u- 
sion before him. Again and again he tries, but 
finds no answer. Perplexed, discouraged, in de- 
spair, he may be, but he cannot give up the ques- 
tion. He is sure there must be an answer : he can 



128 



SERMONS. 



never rest content with ignorance and contradic- 
tion. So, as the figure implies, we turn again and 
again to the enigma of life, assured, however baf- 
fled, that some answer there must be. How pa- 
thetic the picture ! What truth to life it conveys ! 
What a testimony to the greatness of man's nature, 
— ay, and to the greatness of God's revelation of 
himself therein. 

For notice the exactness of the Apostle's figure. 
It is chosen with deliberate care. It describes just 
the light in which Christianity, the grace of God 
as revealed in the gospel, compels us to look at the 
present life. The more closely we study the figure, 
the more clearly will its fitness appear. 

I. Revelation has made life an enigma, and the 
gospel has deepened the enigma. The statement 
at first seems startling ; but if we consider it, we 
shall find it is not only a fact, but a most signifi- 
cant fact, — a part of that tribute to our faith 
which comes from the unconscious lips and hearts 
of all who have known the gospel, or have come 
within the reach and range of even its partial in- 
fluence. 

Look at the figure again. What is a riddle, an 
enigma ? It is not a mere mystery, but a mystery 
which some one has set before us by design, — a 
mystery with a meaning behind it, with an answer 
somewhere. It implies intention and purpose : it 



SERMOXS. 



129 



makes a disclosure necessary. It is and must be 
the product of mind. It is neither fate nor chance. 
It is not mere unintelligent coincidence. The child 
would soon give over his effort to solve the puzzle 
if he were not sure there was meaning to be found 
there. He would not seek to unravel mere confu- 
sion or expect to find a clue to chaos. What is 
true of the child is equally true of the man. He 
will not try to read the riddle of nature or of his- 
tory imless he believes there is a meaning behind 
it. Hence, outside of revelation and its assurance 
of order and purpose, inductive science knows lit- 
tle progress, and history is never studied as a com- 
plete and ordered whole. I know, of course, what 
Mohammedan Spain accomplished, but this is not 
an exception ; for Mahomet drew from the Jewish 
revelation the secret of progress, and science, in 
Mohammedan Spain, however close its observation, 
reached no broad and fruitful generalization. Not 
science or history, however, is our direct theme 
now, but rather life, of which these are a part. 

Christianity compels men, then, to regard life as 
an enigma. The mystery of the world was there 
before : Christianity makes it a mystery with a 
meaning. When the light of the gospel has dawned 
on us, we are sure there must be a meaning, and 
we cannot choose but seek it. This is true, not of 
the believer alone, but of all who are born beneath 
9 



130 



SERMONS. 



its light. Take a community like ours : let any 
calamity befall a good man, such as his care and 
foresight could not have prevented, let evil follow 
upon some good action, and we are all perplexed 
and troubled at the result. When death invades 
a home, sudden death, and takes away the young 
man, the husband, the father, in the very prime of 
life and usefulness, the minister knows what the 
mourners will say. They cannot understand how 
God, who is good and who is our Father, should 
deal thus with them. They cannot understand, 
and their language implies that they expect to un- 
derstand, they ought to understand ; and hence 
they complain as if justly disappointed because 
they do not understand. Now, Christianity, the 
gospel, has created this expectation. The disap- 
pointment comes from the fact that life is not a 
mystery simply : it is an enigma. 

The significance of this fact is only realized 
when we reflect that no other religion, no religion 
outside of revelation, has created such a demand or 
awakened and called out such an expectation. We 
find it in the Old Testament, upon the lips of prophet 
and psalmist and patriarch. " Thou art of purer 
eyes than to behold evil," cries Habakkuk, " and 
canst not look on iniquity : wherefore lookest thou 
upon them that deal treacherously, and boldest thy 
tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is 



SERMONS. 



131 



more righteous than he ? and makest men as the 
fishes of the sea, as the creeping things, that have 
no ruler over them ? " ^ " Behold, these are the 
ungodly, who prosper in the world," complains 
Asaph ; " they increase in riches. Verily I have 
cleansed my heart in vain, and w^ashed my hands 
in innocency." ^ " The earth is given into the 
hands of the wicked," sighs Job : " he covereth 
the faces of the judges thereof; if not, where 
and who is he?"^ "That be far from thee," 
pleads Abraham, "to do after this manner, to slay 
the righteous with the wicked : and that the right- 
eous should be as the wicked, that be far from 
thee : shall not the judge of all the earth do right ?" ^ 
These are questionings of a kindred tone with ours : 
it is the enigma still that presses sorely upon these 
hearts. 

But when we turn to the pagan world, we find 
a different tone and view. The mystery is still 
there, but the enigma is gone : there is not even 
the hope of a clue. Neither expectation nor dis- 
appointment remains. The pagan looked in Greece 
and Rome, the pagan still looks in India and Ja- 
pan, upon the great mystery of life, but with a 
blank and unexpectant gaze, not even asking for re- 
lief. No thin veil that half reveals what it hides, 

1 Hab. i. 13, 14. 2 Psalm Ixxiii. 12, 13. 

' Job ix. 24. Genesis xviii. 25. 



132 



SERMONS. 



no curtain whose folds are for a moment drawn 
aside, invites the sad but eager eye and heart. It 
is a blank wall that confronts him, with no break 
and no promise of relief. 

I have been reading of late a selection of epi- 
grams from the Greek anthology, — brief poems 
arranged according to their subjects from the wide 
circle of the world's most perfect literature. The 
poems upon Fate and Change, Death and Life, 
are most significant. Here are all the pathos, ten- 
derness, and sorrow with which our human lot and 
sympathy invest such themes. We feel the fresh 
grief, as we read, over the loss of friends and kin- 
dred, and even of the household pets, in those 
homes so far away. Here are inscriptions and epi- 
taphs upon the betrothed girl, the bride, the mother 
with her babe, the boy of five or seven or twelve 
years old, the faithful nurse, the faithful slave, the 
favorite dog, the tame partridge, the nightingale. 
We feel how close akin we are to these aching- 
hearts, how the brotherhood of sorrow bridges all 
distance of time and space and knits together the 
present and the past. But one thing we miss in 
all this record : one point of difference there is be- 
tw^een these mourners and ourselves. We find no 
hint here of those " obstinate questionings," those 
vain attempts, forever renewed, to find some mean- 
ing in the tangled maze. Disappointment is here. 



SER3I0NS. 



133 



but seldom surprise ; never, we may alnK)st say, 
that bitter sense of wrong whicli troubles our 
hearts. They do not even blame the gods, these 
sufferers of old : they view all as the play of chance 
or the blind movement of unthinking fate. Life 
is to them a mystery, not an enigma. They ex- 
pected little of their gods, and hence they com- 
plained not, and asked no reason for their broken 
hopes. 

It is hard for us to realize a state of mind and 
heart like this : the very atmosphere is so unlike 
the air we breathe. This difference Christianity 
has created ; and in the very complaints, the quer- 
ulous unrest, with which our hearts are filled, be- 
liever and unbeliever alike, beneath the stroke 
of change and death, I find a noble, if uncon- 
scious, tribute to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It 
means much that we should expect and demand of 
this the key to every j)roblem, the answer to the 
enigma of life. No other faith has ever created 
such a demand or awakened such an expectation. 

II. Again, Christianity alone explains the enigma 
of life. Christianity alone can answer the ques- 
tions it has raised. 

These questionings, as we have seen, we all must 
know. They haunt us and follow us despite our- 
selves. They sit, like the fabled sphinx of old, 
confronting every life, demanding to be met and 



134 



SERMONS, 



answered. We turn to philosophy, to the religion 
nature teaches, to the best guesses man can make, 
but find no voice and no reply. We are driven 
back to Christ for the only answer and explana- 
tion. With Simon Peter we still must say, after all 
wanderings and vain attempts to find some other 
clue, Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast 
the words of eternal life." ^ The answer of the 
gospel, then, is the only answer to the enigma. 
That answer is twofold. It tells us why the enigma 
exists : it points to the future with the promise of 
explanation yet to come. We cannot find relief 
unless we listen to both these voices. 

1. The gospel tells us why life is an enigma. It 
is because this world is not a whole, complete in 
itself, but only a part of a greater whole. The 
part does not, it cannot, take the place of the 
whole. It is not meant to satisfy in itself. It is 
intended to awaken thought, desire, and expecta- 
tion, that look beyond and make the future a 
necessity. The broken hopes, the expectations 
unfulfilled, whatever makes this life felt as in- 
complete and unsatisfying, — these all are part of 
God's design. 

You do not expect to find the answer to a prob- 
lem when only half the problem is before you. 
You do not open some romance or novel, some 
1 St. John vi. 68. 



SERMONS, 



135 



story of the outer or the inner life, and think to 
find the first chapter complete in itself. The first 
scene, the first act, of a great drama, does not dis- 
close the entire plot. The interest awakened there 
must be sustained and deepened to the very end. 
If it falls or fails before this point, the drama is 
itself a failure. Life, it is said, is a drama, of 
which the fifth act lies in another world. Life, 
says the apostle, is an enigma, an unanswered rid- 
dle, because we know in part alone, and not the 
whole. 

"It is the glory of God to conceal a thing," ^ 
runs the Hebrew jDroverb. You remember what a 
change has passed over all your thought and life 
as you have passed from childhood into man's 
estate. What different standards, estimates, ideas, 
you have to-day from those you had at eight, at 
ten, at twelve years of age ! And what a dwarfing 
of your life it would have been, had the childish 
thought and fancy never grown larger and deeper ! 
The prattling words, the half -formed thought, the 
imperfect reasoning, all had their place ; but when 
manhood came, you put away and left behind these 
childish things. The problem which it cost the 
little brains such pains to answer, you understand 
to-day at a single glance. You have a wider range 
of knowledge on which to draw, experience and a 
^ Prov. XXV. 2. 



136 



SERMONS, 



trained intelligence for your help. What wonder, 
then, since we are all children, undeveloped chil- 
dren, here, with this narrow range, this limited ex- 
perience, — what wonder life, itself a part, should 
be to us an enigma ? 

2. The gospel points us toward an answer yet to 
come. If it does not bring the full solution of the 
problem here, it shows us where that full solution 
lies. If it makes the future a necessity to our con- 
science and our thought, it adds the highest as- 
surance of the reality and satisfaction beyond. 
"Now," says the apostle, "at this moment," more 
literally, we see through a mirror in an enigma ; 
but then," with emphasis, "face to face." "Xow 
I know in part; but then shall I know," know 
fully, as the margin adds, " even as also I was fully 
known." It is not omniscience which the words 
guarantee to us : that, like every other divine at- 
tribute, is God's, and God's alone. But we shall 
see enough to make the mystery plain. So from 
some height you look down upon the winding roads 
that lead through forests and valleys toward a sin- 
gle centre, some populous city, it may be. The 
wayfarer sees but a few rods before him ; his eye 
cannot pass the nearest curve, but from your height 
you see the whole. 

" Thy truth gives promise of a dawn 
Beneath whose light I am to see, 



SERMONS. 



137 



When all these bliiidiug veils are drawn, 
This was the wisest path for me." ^ 

The Apostle is thinking also of a more direct 
suggestion in the clauses before us. In place of 
the reflection in the mirror, we shall then see the 
reality. In place of the part, that face or side 
which is turned toward the glass and so alone dis- 
closed to view, we shall know the whole. Faith, 
hope, and love will still be needed, and remain so 
long as the creature is finite and the Creator infi- 
nite ; but the vision of God and the clear sight of 
all thino's in his lio'ht will fill the soul with un- 
troubled trust, unfailing expectation, unquestion- 
ing love. Such is the solution to which the gospel 
points. Such the promise which the future holds. 
To all our questionings this is the reply. 

" life as futile, tlieii, as frail ! 

O for thy voice to soothe and bless ! 
What hope of answer or redress ? 
Behind the veil, behind the veil." ^ 

Revelation, then, creates the enigma of life. It 
changes life from a confused maze, an unmeaning 
mystery, into an enigma, a mystery with a mean- 
ing. Christianity both deepens and enlarges the 
enigma, and explains it, giving a present reason 

^ S. Johnson. 

2 Tennyson, Iti Memoriarn, 5G [old editions 55], 7. 



138 



SERMONS. 



for its existence and a promise of its solution in 
the future. No other religion has accomplished or 
even attempted either of these tasks. Let us learn 
to prize more highly that faith which proves itself 
to us all by its unconscious influence over us, and 
to those who follow its leading reveals an ever- 
growing light and promise. Let us learn, then, to 
use this light, and walk with greater confidence 
and wait with calmer trust. 

1. Let us learn to meet aright, in manly and 
Christian spirit, the questions and problems of life. 
We may be sure they will arise in our own expe- 
rience over and over again. We cannot wholly 
put them aside. When the mind only is touched 
by them, we may divert our attention and seek to 
rest content in simple ignorance. But the heart is 
more importunate. " My heart, I cannot still it," 
sings the poet ; and, when the change and sorrow 
come most closely home, the content that comes 
from ignorance, from agnosticism, is scattered to 
the winds. The words of eternal life alone can 
satisfy then. 

2. Let us beware of expecting the full solution 
here. An}^ philosophy, any theory of life, which 
claims to have answered all the problems of the 
world, proves thereby its incompleteness, its failure 
to grasp all the facts. To cut the knot is not to 
loosen it, to deny or ignore the enigma is not to 



SERMONS. 



139 



answer it. Eemember the \yliole message of the 
gospel. Look forward to its promise as well as 
accept its present comfort. 

3. Let us remember that the promise and an- 
swer of the gospel belong to the faithful heart, and 
not to the clear head alone. 

" For meek Obedience, too, is Light, 

And following that is finding Kim.'' i 

The closer we walk with Christ, the more we 
obey him, the more his truth grows clear and all- 
compelling. "Verily, verily, I say unto thee," he 
said to Xicodemus, "we speak that we do know, 
and testify that we have seen. ... If I have told 
you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall 
ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things ? " ^ AVe 
may also reverse the inference. If we have be- 
lieved and proved His testimony in earthly things 
and found it true, we cannot but believe the wit- 
ness that outruns our sight, of heavenly things. 
He never has misled us, never has been proved to 
be mistaken, in the path of present duty : shall we 
not believe Him, then, when He speaks with the 
same calmness and assurance of perfect knowledge 
of the things unseen, of the world beyond, of the 
Father's house? So shall we find grace to wait 

1 J. R. Lowell, Above and Below. 

2 St. John iii. 11, 12. 



140 



SERMONS. 



with patience for the clearer light on our present 
mystery, and say, with the Apostle's confidence, 
" Now we see in a mirror, in an enigma, but then 
face to face : now I know in part, but then shall I 
know fully, even as also I was fully known." 

" Between the mysteries of death and life 

Thou standest, loving, guiding, — not explaining ; 

AVe ask, and thou art silent, — yet we gaze. 

And our charmed hearts forget their drear complaining ! 

Xo crushing fate, no stony destiny ! 

Thou Lamb that hast been slain, we rest in thee ! 



" Thy pierced hand guides the mysterious wheels ; 

Thy thorn-crowned brow now wears the crown of power ; 
And, when the dark enigma presseth sore. 

Thy patient voice saith, ' Watch with me one hour ! ' 
As sinks the moaning river in the sea 
In silver peace, so sinks my soul in Thee ! " ^ 



1 Mrs. H. B. Stowe. 



DANTE'S VISION OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 

A STUDY OF THE IXFERXO. 

The face of the great poet of Florence must 
have fitly revealed his character. The death-mask 
of Dante, the best known — perhaps, as late re- 
searches lead us to believe, the only genuine — like- 
ness of the poet, at first sight repels the beholder. 
There seems a mysterious kinship between this face 
and the Fates of Michael Anoelo. It mio-ht serve 
as a representation of Nemesis even, for every line 
from brow to chin looks cold and unyielding. But 
closer study of the features softens this first repul- 
sion, and leaves an impression much gentler and 
truer. What first seemed hardness and severity be- 
comes a righteous indignation against wrong, and 
beneath apparent scorn there lies a tenderness un- 
utterable, a love that has learned to be most kind 
because it has learned to be most just. 

A kindred change comes over the man who stud- 
ies faithfully the poet's masterpiece and largest 
legacy to the world, the " Divina Commedia." The 
hasty reader, especially if his reading is confined 
to the Inferno," is repelled by much that is gro- 



142 



DANTE'S VISION 



tesque, unseemly, and even cruel. He sees only 
partiality and caprice in the allotments of eternity, 
and the poem strikes him as a sorry travesty on 
justice, a miserable nightmare of vengeance, in- 
spired by personal spite, by private prejudice or 
partisan hate and fierceness. " The whole place of 
punishment," writes Leigh Hunt, content with his 
first impression, " is a reductio ad absurdum, as 
ridiculous as it is melancholy ; so that one is aston- 
ished how a man who thought himself so far ad- 
vanced beyond his age, and who possessed such 
powers of discerning the good and beautiful, could 
endure to let his mind live in so foul and foolish a 
region for any length of time, and there wreak and 
harden the unworthiest of his passions." Such 
wonder is not strange after a single reading, in a 
mind like that of the essayist, sensitive rather 
than profound. That the denunciation, however, 
is as partial and superficial as sweeping verdicts 
are wont to be, may be inferred from the life of 
the poem, and its widening and deepening influ- 
ence over the higher thought of men. Even among 
English-speaking people, the admiration of Dante, 
although slow in its growth, has almost passed into 
a cultus, and men of widest difference in taste and 
pursuits unite to do him homage. What is yet 
more remarkable, intelligent appreciation of his 
work not infrequently grows in inverse proportion 



OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 



143 



to tlie distance at wliich men stand from his own 
modes and forms of faith. All this would have 
been impossible, but for the intrinsic and abiding 
worth of the work. Had the poem been only a 
partisan pamphlet, or a personal satire, it would 
have shared the fate of these, it would have been 
as short-lived as they. Dante is not a Dean Swift 
or a Defoe, and the " Divina Commedia " cannot 
be brought down to the level of Hudibras. Dante's 
feeling for righteousness, his keen sense of the 
eternal distinction between right and wrong, his 
belief in the inflexible certainty of justice, — these 
have held fast the homage of men who have lost 
sight of God and given up all faith in the world 
to come. My present purpose is to emphasize 
these features of the poem, and, beneath what 
seems repulsive and discordant, to seek the founda- 
tions of essential wisdom, justice, and love. A full 
view cannot be given in the compass of this essay, 
and our attention will therefore centre in the first 
Cantica, the " Inferno." Dante's doctrine of sin 
and judgment, as developed in the " Divina Com- 
media," is our subject. 

An intelligent interpretation of the poem must 
begin with Dante's own words. " The subject of 
this work," he writes to Can Grande, " must be 
considered according to the letter first, and then ac- 
cording to the allegorical meaning. . . . The sub- 



144 



DANTE'S VISION 



ject of the whole work, then, taken literally, is the 
state of souls after death, regarded as a matter of 
fact. For from this and around this the action of 
the whole work moves. But according to the alle- 
gorical meaning, the subject is man, in so far as 
by merit or demerit, in the exercise of free will, he 
is exposed to the rewards or punishments of justice. 
. . . The object of the whole work, as of each part, 
is to bring those who live in this life out of their 
state of misery, and to guide them to the state of 
blessedness." Restricting his words, then, to the 
" Inferno," his purpose is to reveal, beneath the 
vivid lines and colors of actual facts, that inevita- 
ble sequence between sin and suffering, which runs 
through all worlds because it is built upon unchan- 
ging righteousness. His appeal here is to the rea- 
son and conscience of mankind : it needs no reve- 
lation to give to it either force or clearness. Hence, 
the name of God is unheard in these deeps of 
gloom : hence, also, Vergil, who proves so poor a 
guide along the ascent of Purgatory, and who fades 
from sight as we enter even the earthly Paradise, 
leads with sure steps down the dizzy steeps and 
along the winding corridors of Hell. With sin as 
a terrible and universal fact in human life, reason 
can foresee, conscience can foretell, both the cer- 
tainty and the very form of doom : but the assur- 
ance and power of renewal, and the first faint out- 



OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 145 

lines of the heavenly vision, eye hath not seen, nor 
ear heard, nor heart conceived, but God who has 
created can alone reveal them by His Spirit. By 
reason and conscience, the poet would have us 
judge his work, as we pass from circle to circle of 
the world below : the faith that is born of divine 
grace must lead us through both the worlds above. 

Let us pause with Dante, and read again the in- 
scription over the sombre gates of Hell. To us as 
to the poet, the meaning may be hard at first, but 
the words will strike the keynote to all that fol- 
lows. I give the first three lines for their solemn 
cadence, and that we may not mar the symmetry 
of the whole : the last six contain the important 
truths we are studying : — 

" Per me si va nella citta dolente ; 

Per me si va nelP eterno dolore ; 

Per me si va tra la perduta gente. 

Giustizia mosse '1 mio alto Fattore : 

Fecemi la divina Potestate, 

La somma Sapienza, e '1 primo Amore. 

Dinanzi a me non fur cose create, 

Se non eterne, ed io eterno duro : 

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate." ^ 
1 Inferno, iii. 1-9. 

" Through me you pass into the city of woe ; 
Through me you pass into eternal pain ; 
Through me among the people lost for aye. 
Justice the founder of my fabric moved : 
To rear me was the task of power divine, 
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love. 
Before me things create were none, save things 
Eternal, and eternal I endure : 
All hope abandon, ye who enter here." — Cabt. 

10 



146 



DANTE'S VISION 



Eighteousness is the moral cause of the world of 
despair ; for giustizia is the full heir as well as the 
lineal descendant of the Latin justitia. Neither 
language has any other word for righteousness, 
and the meaning is far broader than our "justice." 
Over the great code of Roman law runs the in- 
scription, Justice is the fixed and everlasting will 
to give each man his due." So over the eternal 
world of Dante we read, " Justice moved my lofty 
Maker." Even-handed justice, as Shakespeare puts 
it, righteousness that marks the eternal distinction 
of right and wrong, demands that the distinction 
be forever recognized in the broad world of fact, 
and in the experience of every conscious child of 
choice. By that moral necessity which men call a 
divine decree, a possible sin, and therefore a possi- 
ble hell, was involved in the very creation of finite 
will : as soon as that possibility turned to terrible 
fact, chain and sequence stood complete, and suf- 
fering followed sin. But this first tragedy ante- 
dated the fall, the creation of man, the whole 
world of time : sin entered the world invisible, and 
hell began with the fall of Lucifer. So long, too, 
as sin endures, suffering must follow as the shadow 
follows the dark substance ; but reason and con- 
science by themselves discern no limit to trans- 
gression, and hence see no end of pain. Revela- 
tion may bring her hint or her assurance, but here 



OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 



147 



there is no appeal to revelation. Hence, whether 
we look before or after, the dark gate looms up 
before us, casting its shadow of despair far beyond 
the limits of time, across the two eternities, and 
the inscription proves sadly true : — 

^'Before me things create were none, save things 
Eternal, and eternal I endure : 
All hope abandon, ye who enter here." 

But righteousness, as we have said, is more than 
simple justice. It includes all attributes of deity, 
it belongs alike to every revelation of God. The 
divine Power, the supreme Wisdom, and the primal 
Love, are all associated with Justice in this dark 
inscription. The Trinity is clearly indicated in 
Dante's words, and the teaching, therefore, is that 
Father, Son, and Spirit, — Power, Wisdom, Love, 
are one in their eternal righteousness, and in this 
its full expression. The recognition of man's ill 
desert as a universal fact, and of retribution as the 
inevitable law of the moral universe, is the founda- 
tion of Dante's "Purgatory" and "Paradise," no 
less than of the "Inferno." His doctrine of re- 
demption rests on the perfect fulfillment of the law 
by Christ, which both manifested the divine grace 
and condescension, and met, as man could not have 
met, the demands of righteousness. But the de- 
velopment of this doctrine is apart from our pres- 



148 



DANTE'S VISION 



ent purpose, and I mention it to show the harmony 
of this legend over the " Inferno," with Dante's 
higher teaching. 

The sternness of these majestic lines softens into 
tenderness as the poet passes through the throng 
of shadowy forms, and the doctrine grows concrete 
in human lives. An unutterable pathos breathes 
through the sighs and groans of this opening canto, 
and finds its climax in the beautiful figure, bor- 
rowed from Vergil, but improved by borrowing : — 

" Come d' autunno si levan le foglie 
L' una appresso dell' altra, iDfin che '1 ramo 
Rende alia terra tutte le sue spoglie; 
Similemente il mal seme d' Adamo, 
Gittansi di quel lito ad una ad una, 
Per cenni com' augel per suo richiamo." ^ 

I cannot forget the many moving pictures of our 
human frailty which the poets give, and espe- 
cially the long procession of our human life, as it 
meets us in the " Eubaiyat " of Omar Khayyam, 
touched to new meaning by Vedder's wonder-work- 
ing pencil : — 

1 Inferno, iii. 112-117. 

" As fall off the light autumnal leaves, 
One still another following, till the bough 
Strews all its honors on the earth beneath ; 
E'en in like manner Adam's evil brood 
Cast themselves, one by one, down from the shore 
Each at a beck, as falcon at his call." 



OF SIN AXn JUDGMENT. 



149 



A Moment's Halt — a momentary taste 

Of Being from the Well amid the Waste — 

And Lo ! — the phantom Caravan has reached 
The XOTHTN'G it set out from — oh, make haste ! " 

But I can recall no other verses that equal these of 
Dante in the portrayal of our sad, sinful, wander- 
ing race, moving steadily onward toward the com- 
mon doom of sin. 

The common doom, I said : but my subject re- 
minds me that the phrase is singularly inexact. 
That all sin brings sorrow, and is infinitely re- 
moved from the light of God, he has already taught 
us. But Dante never confounded sins in the com- 
mon sin. Even-handed Justice is always his guide, 
and never have grades in guilt and grades in pun- 
ishment received a more careful distinction than in 
the Inferno.'' And thus we pass to consider the 
broad outline and grouping of this nether world, as 
it illustrates the righteousness of God. 

In the outermost circle, called Limbo, or the 
border-land, are found the shades of unbaptized in- 
fants and those non-believers of every age, who, 
without the three theological or Christian virtues, 
faith, hope, and charity, have led worthy and use- 
ful lives in their generation. The whole region is 
free from torment ; sorrow rather than pain is the 
rule. And those who have shown peculiar excel- 
lence in the world above are crowned with special 



150 



DANTE'S VISION 



privilege by heaven. Here is the noble castle 
reared by wisdom and worth, defended by the 
seven virtues, as walls and bulwarks, surrounded 
by the stream of eloquence, and entered by the 
seven gates of knowledge. Here sorrow reaches 
its lowest measure, and in their semblance these 
heroes are neither grieved nor glad. Their place 
and state are nobler than were known to the hap- 
piest shades in the Elysian fields of Homer or of 
Vergil. As Wordsworth sings in "Laodomia," — 

" Calm pleasures there abide — majestic pains." 

This is a world — 

" whose course is equable and pure, 
No fears to beat away, — no strife to heal, — 
The past unsighed for, and the future sure." 

Here are 

" heroic arts in graver mood 
Revived, with finer harmony pursued." 

Pensiveness and melancholy are here, such as the 
soul must feel, shut out from the highest spiritual 
ITfe ; but the delights of reason remain, and the 
sages and bards are absorbed in lofty meditation 
and communion. The conception of such a state 
and place as Limbo bears witness to a spirit more 
generous and just than we have been wont to as- 
cribe to mediaeval theology. 



OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 



151 



But Limbo is not included witliin the confines 
of Hell, and at the entrance of this darker realm 
we feel the change in atmosphere and tone. On 
the very threshold each sinful soul stands in open 
confession, while Minos, the heathen judge, admin- 
isters the sentence, a symbol of the heathen con- 
science which thus approves the decisions of the 
eternal world. Each sinner is self-condemned. 
Divine justice acts upon the guilty soul in no me- 
chanical and outward fashion, but from within is 
the impulse that drives each onward to his merited 
punishment. Nor is there one complaint from 
these tortured souls that the penalty is beyond the 
sin. The tragedy of Prometheus, as ^schylus has 
portrayed it, conscience on the side of the sufferer 
and against the judge, is impossible in Dante's 
thought and vision. When Vergil speaks of him- 
self, he is careful that he may not be confounded 
with actual transgressors punished in deeper cir- 
cles, but he breathes no murmur against the Power 
that has shut him out of Paradise. Curses we 
hear, loud and deep, in diverse parts of hell, curses 
against self, against kindred, and against God, but 
not one voice denies its ill desert, and " every mouth 
is stopped," in the solemn language of the Apostle, 
while the whole wretched world is proven guilty 
before God. 

This execution of justice from within outward, is 



152 



DANTE'S VISION 



a constant feature in the teaching of Dante. In 
the " Purgatorio," no outward bounds hedge in the 
soul within one sphere of torment. Like Geron- 
tius, in Newman's marvelous dream, the soul in 
Purgatory finds solace in her suffering, until she 
feels herself purged and ready to mount to another 
circle. Then, as she rises of her ow^n volition, the 
mountain trembles in sympathy and exultation. 
Purification, first accomplished within the soul, is 
recognized and welcomed by all the universe as 
soon as manifest without. Even the delay before 
the process of purgation begins, the soul accepts 
as just, and patiently awaits the appointed hour. 
Casella, on the threshold of Purgatory, kept back 
from beginning his journey upward, says : — 

" No outrage has been done me, 
If he who takes both when and whom he pleases, 
Has many times denied to me this passage, 
For of a righteous will his own is made." 

Following Aristotle, whom he reverences as il 
maestro di color che sanno^ Dante divides all sins 
into three broad classes, — Incontinence, Bestiality, 
and Malice. These sins, with all their varied shades 
and forms, fall into successive and ever-deepening 
circles of infamy. Some critics discover in their 
order a single principle alone, the proportion of 
injury which each specific sin brings upon the sin- 
ner's fellow-men. As I read the poet, however, 



OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 



153 



this principle is subordinate to one far more pro- 
found, the depth of moral baseness which the spe- 
cific sin betrays and involves. In the subdivision 
of the broad classes, this latter principle is cer- 
tainly followed, for suicides and spendthrifts are 
ranged below robbers and homicides. This princi- 
ple also best accords with Dante's view of sin, as 
something horrible and worthy of damnation in 
itself, quite apart from the consequences it brings 
to others. And with Dante, measure as well as 
kind, of punishment are strictly proportioned to 
the sin. 

Incontinence, the first broad class, covers all 
inordinate indulgence of passion, appetite, and 
desire, whether the form be lust or gluttony, ava- 
rice or prodigality, anger or sullen gloom. These 
all are sins of surprise, which bring a speedy al- 
though it may be only a superficial feeling of re- 
vulsion, and hence do not imply of necessity a 
resolute perversity of will. But Incontinence tends 
downward, toward sins of darker dye. Lust dwells 
hard by hate. Sensual pleasure, of whatever kind, 
like the Medusa's head, which Dante makes its 
symbol, blinds the eye of the intellect and hardens 
the heart. Men who live in vice do not like to re- 
tain God in their knowledge : they think of the 
present alone, till at last they deny the spiritual 
life, disbelieve in the world to come, and, like the 



154 



DANTE'S VISION 



fool, say in the heart, There is no God. This is 
the sphere of Bestialism, or besottedness, so called 
by the poet, because men, by denying their Maker, 
unmake His image in which they were created, and 
sink to the level of the brutes, who perceive no 
spiritual existence, and no life beyond the senses. 
Infidels and heretics fill this circle, the latter be- 
cause, by representing God as other than He has 
revealed Himself, they really deny Him. But Bes- 
tiality is not a final stage : it leads to still deeper 
sin, to Malice. Men may forget God and deny all 
immortality, and yet retain the warmest feeling for 
humanity, — individuals in our own time are in- 
stances in point, — but Dante felt that the natural 
tendency of atheism is to the loss of human feeling. 
Can we deny, on the broad scale, that this is the 
result in society with its larger reading of life? 
History, at least, shows no instance where a com- 
munity has lost all sense of the divine Fatherhood 
and yet has retained the feeling of human brother- 
hood. Malice makes our neighbor's injury its end, 
and is therefore a sin of deliberate purpose. This 
must explain the difference in punishment between 
certain sins in this category, and some that seem 
like these, but are punished imder incontinence. 
But injury may be wrought in either of two ways, 
by force or by fraud. Violence, or force, may be 
used against our neighbor, ourselves, or God : and 



OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 



155 



in each of these cases its exercise may be direct, 
against the person, or indirect, against some pos- 
session, of the being wronged. Men who lay vio- 
lent hands upon their neighbors, in person by 
death or wounds, or in property by rapine, are 
tyrants, murderers, and robbers. The suicide lays 
violent hands upon himself, the spendthrift upon 
his own property. Finally, the divine Majesty 
may be violated, in His blessed Person, in Nature, 
which is His child ; in Art, which is His grand- 
child. Hence, within this class are found impious 
blasphemers, and also those who, ignoring the great 
law of Genesis, " In the sweat of thy brow shalt 
thou eat bread," seek to live by the gains of usury. 
The second subdivision of Malice, Fraud, is the 
basest of sins. It may break the simple bond of 
natural confidence, or it may break beside this some 
special tie of trust. Hence, in ten pits are punished 
deceivers, flatterers, simoniacs, sorcerers, barterers 
of justice, hypocrites, thieves, evil counselors, schis- 
matics, sowers of discord, and falsifiers. Last come 
the lowest sinners of all, traitors, divided into four 
classes, according as they have betrayed their kin- 
dred, their country, their guests, or their lords. 
These lowest circles of the pit, let it be said for 
the honor of humanity, are also the narrowest, and 
take their names from most infamous examples of 
these several crimes — Caina, Antenora, Ptolemsea, 



156 



DANTE'S VISION 



and Judecca. Cain represents, of course, the be- 
trayers of their kindred, the Trojan Antenor, be- 
trayers of their country; Ptolemy the Younger 
who betrayed Pompey, betrayers of friends and 
guests ; while Judas is fitly singled out as the be- 
trayer of his Lord. In the lowest deep of all lies 
Lucifer, basest of ingrates, who, with unequalled 
gifts, turned against his Creator: in each of his 
three mouths hangs one of the three vilest traitors, 
as Dante held them, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. 
The punishment of Brutus, and even of Cassius, 
may seem to us unjustly severe, but we must re- 
member that to Dante the Roman Empire was 
established by the direct will of God, and whoever 
undermined its power was fighting against God. 
If we think of the thousand petty strifes that de- 
stroyed the divided cities of Italy, or contrast the 
turbulence and confusion that filled the world of 
that day, we shall not wonder that so large-minded 
a statesman as Dante longed for the restoration of 
a single government, built upon divine authority, 
to punish vaulting ambition, and maintain peace 
throughout the world. 

Such, in rude outline, is the world of the lost, as 
Dante conceived it. The consistency and power of 
his conception become more impressive, the closer 
we study it, and it can bear comparison with any 
attempt to develop a system of sins and judgments 



OF SIN AND JUDGMENT, 



157 



with which I am acquainted. M. Ortolan, profes- 
sor of penal law in the faculty of Paris, has fol- 
lowed the development of his special science in 
literature as well as in law : he has studied with 
this purpose Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and Shake- 
speare : "But the master of them all,*' he writes, 
" is Dante : their master in time, for he is earlier 
than they by nearly three centuries ; their master 
in originality, no less, for in his conceptions vigor- 
ous unity is maintained through inexhaustible va- 
riety ; his poem presents itself to our study as a 
complete system of punishments/' 

AYe turn now to consider the principle of adapta- 
tion, of analogy, in Dante's system. A favorite 
maxim of the eighteenth century declares those 
punishments the best which are most analogous to 
the crime. Analogy is the delight of the child, of 
primitive races, of the multitude : its simplicity and 
directness speak home to the heart : it needs no 
subtle and elaborate explanations. But, on the 
other hand, its charm lies in the variety of applica- 
tion which it makes possible. The analogy touches 
but a single point : that point may be found in the 
person of the criminal, the parts of the body brought 
into action, the means by which the deed was done, 
the person injured, the nature of the loss inflicted, 
or any of the manifold and multiform elements in 
the great drama of evil. Lift these elements, al- 



158 



DANTE'S VISION 



ready so diverse, into the realm of imagination, let 
the ideal mingle with and mould the material, and 
the shades and forms of reprisal become a bound- 
less field for the poet, with his gifts of symbolism 
and allegory and metaphor. Never was poet more 
keenly alive to the breadth of his opportunity than 
Dante. Never were simplicity and diversity, power 
and variety, combined more skilfully than in the 
" Divina Commedia." 

" Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also 
reap." The whole " Inferno " is a comment and 
illustration, drawn from this single text. What 
fine sarcasm, at the beginning, separates the caitiff 
choir of neutral souls alike from heaven and from 
hell, despised by both ! How fitly their colorless 
life on earth finds reward in the absolute ignominy 
and chaos of the outer darkness ! We, too, would 
choose any lot rather than this : — 

" Misericordia e Giustizia gli sdegna ; 
Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa." ^ 

" He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap 

corruption." In the sphere of Incontinence, those 

who have sown the wind reap the whirlwind. The 

incessant storm which sweeps the victims of lust 

before its blast is type of the ungovernable tem- 

1 Inferno, iii. 50, 51. 

" Mercy and justice scorn them both ; 
Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by." 



OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 



159 



pest of passion within the soul. Cerberus, with 
three throats, emblem of unbridled appetite, a per- 
sonified belly, as Miss Rossetti aptly calls him, 
bays in the ears of those who made the belly their 
god. The avaricious and the prodigals, antipodes 
in method, but one in the senseless waste of goods, 
imprisoned in a single circle, from opposite direc- 
tions dash madly against each other with mutual 
revilings. Wrathful souls, true to their nature 
and their habit, smite one another not only with 
hands, but also with head, and breast, and feet. 
Gloomy sinners, who turned the daylight here to 
darkness, for others as well as for themselves, are 
plunged forever beneath the black waters of 
Styx : — 

" Fitti nel limo die on : * Tristi fummo 
Nell' aer dolce che dal sol s' allegra, 
Portando dentro accidioso fummo; 
Or ci attristiam nella belletta negra.' 
Quest' inno si gorgoglian nella strozza, 
Che dir nol posson con parola Integra." ^ 

Two centuries later than Dante, the author of 
the " Imitation of Christ" sums up in stately Latin 
1 Inferno, vii. 121-126. 

*' Fixed in the slime, they say : ' Sad once were we, 
In the sweet air made gladsome by the sun, 
Carrying a foul and lazy mist within : 
Now in these murky settlings are we sad.' 
Such dolorous strain they gurgle in their throata, 
But word distinct can utter none." 



160 



DANTE'S VISION 



these vivid analogies of Dante : I?i quibus homo 
peccavit, in illis gravius punietur, Ihi accediosi 
ardentihus stimidis pungentin\ et gidosi ingenti 
fame ac siti cruciahuntitr. Ihi luxuriosi et volup)- 
tatum amatores ardenti pice et foetido sulpJiure 
perfundentin\ et siciit f uriosi canes prce dolore 
invidiosi ululahunt} 

Nor is the law of analogy forgotten as we pass 
to graver and deeper sins, sins of the spirit as well 
as of the outer life. Within the city of Dis with 
its flaming walls, those who have insulted the Al- 
mighty by defiance or denial feel the vengeance of 
that God who is a consuming fire. Suicides, since 
they have thrown their manhood away, sink from 
sentient to vegetive existence, and alone of mor- 
tals after the resurrection will remain unclothed, 
their bodies which they despised hanging to the 
branches within which they are forever imprisoned. 
From the region of fire we descend to the fields of 
ice, where Malice finds punishment, — ice, the fit 
symbol of the hardening, chilling effect upon the 
heart when human affections lose their warmth, and 
the soul stiffens into selfishness. Sowers of discord, 
separaters of friends and kindred, pass and repass 
before a demon armed with the sword, who wounds, 
and rends, and cuts asunder their persons, with re- 
peated strokes. Islam Dante views as a schism ; 

1 De Imitatione Christi, I. xxiv. 3. 



OF SIN AXD JUDGMENT. 



161 



and Mahomet, as a divider, bears his face cleft 
from chin to brow. Such are striking examples 
of the varied analogies ^dth which the poet suits 
the penalty to the sin. 

This even-handed justice never falters. There is 
nothing to dazzle the eye, or divert the mind from 
the enormity, the loathsomeness, and the folly of 
the sin. Dante would have despised that respect 
of persons which excuses wickedness on the ground 
of friendship, kinship, or partisan and religious as- 
sociation. He never let the genius of the sinner 
cast a glamour over the baseness of the sin. His 
comrades in political life, his friends and kindred 
are measured by the same standard as the rest of 
the world. His countryman, Ciacco, he puts among 
the gluttons : ^ Cavalcante, father of his dear friend, 
Guido, rises in the fiery vault beside his enemy, 
Farinata : ^ his father's cousin, Geri del Bello, for 
whom he has no word but of sympathy, is found in 
the river of blood, where tyrants and their humbler 
imitators take their fill of gore.'^ Nor can all the 
genius of his revered teacher, Brunetto Latini, save 
him from the race-course of burning sand.^ AVhat 
place would he have found for the heartless selfish- 
ness of Goethe, or the narrow cynicism of Carlyle ? 
Oh for an hour of his scourge of small cords in the 

^ Inferno, vi. 52. 2 ^ 52. 

3 xix. 27. ^ XV. 30. 

11 



162 



DANTE'S VISION 



temple of our modern life, where princes are wel- 
come however dissolute, and titled insolence claims 
the homage of society ! His scathing words still 
ring in our ears, — 

" Quanti si tengon or lassu gran regi, 
Che qui staranno come porci in brago, 
Di se lasciando orribili dispregi ! " ^ 

At the same time the excellences of those who 
are punished receive their meed of fair praise. 
Dante was susceptible to admiration for high at- 
tainment in any sphere. He stood abashed before 
heroes and sages in Limbo. The great Saladin 
and even Mahomet fill his mind with awe. And 
to have conversed with the worthies of the lower 
world exalts him far above himself. He felt, too, 
the sense of human frailty, and owned that sympa- 
thy which must temper judgment in every gener- 
ous soul. He does not forget that 

" tears to human suffering are due; 
And mortal hopes defeated and overthrown 
Are mourned by man, and not by man alone, 
As fondly he believes." ^ 

The familiar story of Francesca, and the sadder 
^ Inferno, viii. 49-51. 

" There above 
How many now hold themselves mighty kings, 
Who here like swine shall wallow in the mire, 
Leaving behind them horrible dispraise ! " 

2 Laodomia, 



OF SIN AND JUDGMENT, 



163 



tale of Ugolino, are suffused with tenderness and 
pathos : of the latter, you remember, so cold a critic 
as Landor could say, " The thirty lines from JEd 
to sentV are unequalled by any other continuous 
thirty in the whole dominions of poetry.'' But no 
partiality could turn aside the wheel of Justice, 
and human feeling, far deeper than many of his 
critics are capable of sharing, cannot make him 
false for a moment to his great principle. We 
may call him severe and stern, but it is the sever- 
ity and sternness of law, of nature, and, with all 
reverence Dante would have added, of God. 
Again and again he rebukes the easy-going senti- 
mentalism which forgets the eternal distinction of 
right and wrong, and dares to criticise with nar- 
row vision the verdicts of the Omniscient. " Now 
who art thou," cries the eagle of Paradise, 

" that on the bench would sit 
In judgment at a thousand miles away, 
With the short vision of a single span ? " ^ 

Traces of bitterness, of personal temper, I do 
not deny. The treatment of Filippo Argenti,- of 
Bocca degil Abatl,'^ and, above all, of Frate Al- 
berigo,^ are simply unpardonable. But these are 
the only instances of cruelty I recall, and the tenor 
of the poem is far higher and sweeter than these. 

^ Paradiso, xix. 71-81, Longfellow. 

2 viii. 52-63. ^ ^xxii. 97-106. * xxxiii. 148-150. 



16i 



DANTE'S VISION 



To appreciate Dante, however, we lilust not for- 
get the age in which he lived, and his own relation 
to the church and her schools at that time. The 
Divina Commedia " is not his work alone, nor the 
work of his century alone ; it is the culmination of 
ten Christian centuries of intense thought and feel- 
ing regarding the other life and its relations to 
the present. " In philosophy," says Labitte, " he 
(Dante) completes St. Thomas : in history, he is 
a living commentary upon Villani. Wherever you 
go through the thankless valleys of the Middle 
Ages, this figure, at once sombre and luminous, 
appears at your side as an inevitable guide." So 
Ozanam, the prince of ultramontane commenta- 
tors, pronounces the Commedia " a Summa " of 
all the philosophy of the age, and calls Dante the 
St. Thomas of poetry. Whatever may be said of 
Dante's orthodoxy in other particulars, and into 
this moot question I will not enter, in his escha- 
tology, at least, he does not depart widely from 
the teaching of his church. His aim was not to 
invent or amend, but to give what was already be- 
lieved a larger reality and a stronger hold upon 
the hearts of men, by unfolding the eternal justice 
that lay beneath the subtle distinctions of the 
schools. The broad outline of established doctrine 
he fully accepted. The divisions and general ar- 
rangement of the ••Inferno," the very idea of the 



OF SIN AXD JUDGMENT. 



165 



Purgatorio," the angelic hierarchies of the *• Para- 
dise,'' all are the work of a faithful Catholic. 

These subjects were only too familiar to men of 
his age. They delighted to dwell in imagination 
ujDon the after life, with its baffling but ever-stimu- 
latino; mysteries. Leo'end after leo'end recounted 
descents to the under-world, and art vied with ro- 
mance in giving color and body to eternal scenes. 
Even the details of Dante's vision in many cases 
have been anticipated by artists of earlier days. 
In the cryi^t of the Cathedral at Auxerre is a 
fragment that paints the triumph of Christ as mi- 
nutely as Dante describes it in the " Purgatorio." 
Paintings of Hell and Paradise abound in cathe- 
drals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and 
all forms of torture are exhausted in the sculpture 
of that time. T\^hen Dante studied in Paris, he 
cannot have failed to wonder at the western gate 
of Xotre Dame, with its varied scenes of punish- 
ment and blessedness. A single French archaeolo- 
gist has gathered over fifty illustrations of the 
poem from earlier art. The same coarse and ma- 
terialistic forms of torture are found in painting 
and in poem. It was not an age of fine sensibili- 
ties. To aj^i^eal effectively to hearers and readers, 
the imagery had to be made vivid and powerful. 
The preachers of the age used kindred illustrations. 
Rome felt her religious empire already shaken by 



166 



DANTE'S VISION 



the profane hand of doubt, and to cheek this dan- 
gerous foe, her clergy invoked more boklly the 
fears of eternal torment. With all these materials 
at hand, with the very form in some measure pre- 
scribed, the world waited a poet to combine in a 
symmetrical whole the scattered fragments of myth, 
and legend, and allegory, cast the glow of imagi- 
nation over the dullness of dogma, and call crea- 
tion out of chaos. 

This Dante did, and his work stands, like the 
Gothic cathedral, an eternal symbol of the faith of 
builder and worshippers alike. Much of what is 
grotesque and hard in the poem belongs to the 
times and not to the man. The vividness of de- 
scription, the blaze of the very flames in the read- 
er's eyes, the rivers of blood, the solid floor of ice, 
those hideous nightmares of devils and fabled mon- 
sters, Dante did not invent, but used with higher 
purpose than his contemporaries. The consum- 
mate genius must rise above his age, indeed ; he 
must rise above what is unworthy and coarse in 
the thought of his fellows. But even inspiration 
must lower itself to the understanding of the crea- 
ture, and we must not make too great demands of 
the foremost souls. Shakespeare has written much 
that a better era forgets, and Jonathan Edwards, 
wuth a heart like St. John, shows how hard is the 
bondage of an inhuman theology. Let Dante be 



OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 



167 



judged by the same rule, and we shall forget his 
harshness, and remember the fearless boldness 
which doomed popes to the same punishment with 
people, the firm trust in the great truths of the 
Gospel, and the faith in a divine Love large 
enough to welcome every repentant sinner, what- 
ever the church or the clero v mio*ht declare. 

Once more, we must remember the author's in- 
tense personality. In narrow minds this power 
becomes a prejudice to warp and degrade its every 
expression : in noble minds, it only deepens convic- 
tion, and gives each utterance the force of reality. 
What others gain by reasoning, such minds attain 
by insight. Here is the difference between Dante 
and Milton. Milton's paradise lay quite without 
his own experience : Dante's poem is the record of 
his inner history. Where Milton imagined, Dante 
saw. He had passed through all these gloomy 
scenes himself ; he needed no effort of imagination 
to summon them before himself and then before 
his readers. He spoke, like the Bedford tinker, 
with the authority of the eye-witness. " He no 
more doubted of that Malebolge Pool,'' says Car- 
lyle, " that it all lay there with its gloomy circles, 
its alti giiai, and that he himself should see it, than 
we doubt that we should see Constantinople, if we 
went thither." 

Each of the three Cantiche of the poem has been 



168 



DAXTE'S VISIOX 



linked with the j^eriod of his life to which it be- 
longs, and whose character it reflects. The In- 
ferno** belongs to the vears which immediately fol- 
low his banishment. His heart smarted beneath 
the wrong, his thoughts were full of the civic 
strife. In each verse is the bloody wound, and 
throughout the thunders of conflict reecho. The 
^•Purgatorio ** was written far from home, when the 
first bitterness of exile was over, while new hope 
rose in his breast, as the approach of Henry ^^L 
quickened Ghibelline expectation. The Para- 
diso *' belongs to the last years of his life, when 
earthly hates were forgotten, and earthly hopes 
had all withered, when heaven alone could charm 
the weary soul. Then it was. 

" da martiro 
E da esiglio venne a questa pace.'' 

Such is the personal element in his vision. His 
life was full of hardship and thankless toil. He 
knew the sorrow for ingratitude, he had proved 

come sa di sale 
Lo pane altrui, e com' e duro calle 
Lo scendere e '1 salir per 1' altrui scale." ^ 

Do we wonder that from this world he turned 
to the other for relief ? that, homeless here, he 

^ Paradiso, xvii. 58-60. 

" How salt the savor is of other's bread : 
How hard the passage to descend and climb 
Bt other's stairs I " 



OF SIN AND JUDGMENT. 



169 



sought a resting place there ? or that the chief 
charm of the after-life, to him, lay in the even- 
handed justice which was to set right the troubled 
present ? There he could flee from the tyranny of 
fact to the righteous rule of truth. There he 
could fashion for himself a realm of perfect justice, 
where every wrong should find redress, and every 
right be crowned. And as he dwelt upon the 
righteousness of God, these dreams he knew must 
some fair day come true. Out of his dreams and 
longings rose before his eyes the city of God, that 
Rome where Christ is a Roman, the one eternal 
city, of which every soul that loves and chooses 
righteousness, however exiled here, is already a cit- 
izen, although he must pass now through the pur- 
gatorial flames. On the other side, lurid against 
the utter darkness, loomed up the city of Dis, 
walled round with fire, and peopled by souls so 
deeply sunk in sin that repentance, and therefore 
pardon, were no longer possible. Between these 
two lay the sphere where goodness, still entangled 
with evil, must struggle on the upward path. 
These realms of reality lifted his mind above the 
world of sense, and in the calm contemplation of 
his majestic vision he learned the lesson of patience 
and self-mastery. 



POEMS AND HYMNS. 



POEMS AND HYMNS. 



FRA ANGELICO. 

I LIKE the story of that monk who kuelt 

In prayer devout, and, lest some thought of sin 
Should mar its grace, dared not his work begin 

Till in the silence of his heart he felt 

Thought grow divine and earthly longings melt 
Beneath God's touch, and o'er the Babel din 
Heard the clear whisper of the Christ within. 

What wonder, when such inspiration dwelt 
In his calm bosom, that he dared not rise, 

But day by day, with meek and lowly heart, 
Painted upon his bended knees, and wise 

Deemed not the work his own, but his the part 
To seize what God revealed unto his eyes, 

And bid the panel glow with holy art. 

Cambridge, 29 May, 1874. 



174 POEMS AND HYMNS, 



SUNEISE ON MOUNT MOOSILAUKE. 

Long lines of light against the trembling gray 
Slow flushed with red : above, more faint and 
few, 

The billowy clouds : beneath, in waves of blue 
That rose and fell, dark ranges stretched away 
Where in broad mists the lakes and rivers lay. 

Dim thro' the dawn. Outlined to clearer view. 

As mount from mount his lofty head withdrew, 
A hundred peaks turned patient toward the day. 
O'er the steep height of Carrigain at last 

Rose the red disc, and touched the mists to gold. 
Kinsman's smooth slope and rifted Lafayette 
Still lay in purple bathed, till higher yet 

Thro' golden clouds the glorious sun uproUed, 
And o'er the world the glow of daylight cast. 

2 September, 1887. 

\ 



POEMS AND HYMNS. 



175 



SUNDAY AT SEA. 

Father, whose hands jfirst framed and still uphold 
Both skies and seas with all their depths con- 
ceal, 

In this thy temple on thy day I kneel 
In lowly love and worship. Fold on fold, 
Gray curtains shot with light — even as of old 

In rapt Isaiah's vision fell the train 

Of heavenly splendor — skirt the solemn main : 
Above the blue vault hangs, with lamp of gold 

Lighted each day anew. No voice I hear, 
No sail the distance whitens. Silent, swift, 
Our good ship forges on, the only shrine 

Man's hands have reared. Yet ever, far and 
near, 

The murmuring waves in lowly worship lift 
White hands of prayer, and mingle praise with 
mine. 

S. S. Alaska, 8 July, 1888. 



176 



POEMS AND HYMNS. 



STRATFOED-ON-AVON. 

Here Shakespeare's eyes first opened to the sun. 
These vine-wreathed elms, green fields, and skies 
of blue 

Cradled his infancy. Here first he drew 
Love's breath of life, and here his first songs won 
Love's praise. What wonder when his course had 
run 

In wider circles, tried of heart but true, 
Hither he came the old life to renew. 
And sleep by Avon when his life was done ! 

So should the favored life begin and end : 

Child unto man and birth with death close 
bound. 

An CTcn stream through all the channel flows : 
The friend of youth should be old age's friend. 
The natal bells the passing knell should sound, 

And on familiar scenes the eyelids close ! 
15 August, 1888. 



POEMS AND HYMNS. 



177 



IN GRASMERE CHURCHYARD. 

" Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her." 

Lines near T intern Abbey. 

Full twoscore years the poet's form has slept 
In Grasmere churchyard. Friends have long 
ago 

Followed him, one by one. The places know 
Him still that knew him once, nor stone has kept 
His name alone. The very turf he stept 
Upon seems to remember. Murmuring low. 
Fair Rothay's waters with a gentler flow 
Bend round his grave. The faithful dews have 
wept 

Him morn and eve anew, and year by year 

Have spread a richer verdure o'er the sod. 
No human hands have scattered blossoms here, 

And all is fresh as from the hands of God ; 
Yet — mark how Nature holds her lover dear — 

Twin buttercups above the grasses nod ! 

13 July, 1888. 



I 



178 



POEMS AND HYMNS. 



STAFFA AND lONA. 

Behold the temple wrought in living rock 
For Nature's worship ! When together sung 
For joy the morning-stars, their voices rung 

Through these dark aisles. This pavement, block 
by block, 

Was laid deep in the sunless seas to mock 

The angry waves. When yonder vault was 
hung. 

On either side a thousand pillars sprung 
To lift its arch above the tempest's shock. 

Temple not made with hands ! Man, taught by 
thee. 

Might well have learned his lofty fanes to rear. 
Touching to purpose new the lifeless stone : 

Yet ages passed ere man's foot ventured near 
Thy shore, while in thy maker's ear alone 
Thundered the deep bass of the restless sea ! 



POEMS AND HYMNS. 



179 



STAFFA AND lONA. 

Far o'er the sea, mile after barren mile, 

What green hills slope toward the northern 
strand ? 

One square gray tower I see : on either hand 
Are broken walls. It is Columba's isle. 
Sea-girt lona. Yonder massive pile, 

That chapel small, those ruined cloisters, stand 
Where the brave saint gathered his little band, 
And sent forth light to Britain. Slow defile 
Before mine eyes long lines of chiefs and kings, 
Brought hither by his dust to lie at rest 
With abbots who of old his crozier bore. 
Thus, though no more his living presence flings 
Its light and splendor o'er the island blest, 
His name still breathes from rock and hill 
and shore. 
Oban, Scotland, 22 Juli/, 1888. 



180 



POEMS AND HYMNS. 



FOUNTAINS ABBEY. 

Soft falls the sunlight o'er the minster gray ; 
The stately tower, the cloisters dim and lone, 
The graves where abbots of the ages gone 
Are laid. No rude hand here hath swept away 
MuUion or shaft. The fingers of decay , 
With slow and gentle touches, one by one. 
Have loosened arch and wall and crumbling 
stone, 

And left the ruins of an elder day ! 

Man's worship ceases : Nature's doth not so. 
Both priest and choir are gone. But over all 
Ivy and greensward live, the thrushes sing 
Their matins in the yew-trees, waters flow 

Beneath the cloisters, and the wild pinks swing 
Their censers rich with incense from the wall ! 
1 August, 1888. 



POEMS AND HYMNS. 



181 



STONEHENGE. 

Wheee leaden skies the low horizon meet, 
Thy gray stones tower above the rolling plain 
In lonely grandeur. Half thy pillared fane 

In ruin lies. Yet is thine altar-seat 

To yonder sun-stone true, as when complete 
Thy sacred circles stood, when bloody stain 
Ran down thy slaughter-block, and mad amain, 

The druids danced beneath thy cruel feet ! 

Mysterious shrine ! Thy lichened stones have kept 
Their secret well ! Dane, Saxon, Roman, knew 

Little as we thy meaning dark and dread ! 
And none shall know, till those awaken, who 
Beneath thy grassy barrows long have slept. 

And at the judgment earth gives up her dead I 
Salisbury Plaix, 21 August, 1888. 



POEMS AND HYMNS. 



"PEACE, BE STILL." 

Dear Lord, who once upon the lake 

Of stormy Galilee, 
Didst from Thy weary pillow wake 

To hush the wind and sea, — 

Come at our prayer, and speak Thy peace 
Within each troubled breast ; 

Bid the loud winds of passion cease, 
And waves of wild unrest. 

Let that deep calm our bosoms fill. 
That dwells for aye with those 

Who lose their wishes in Thy will. 
And in Thy love repose ! 



"FEED MY LAMBS." 

TO A TEACHER OF LITTLE CHILDREN. 

When the Master long ago 
Walked this weary world below, 
Mothers in the 'throng and press 
Brought their babes for Him to bless, 
And from lane and dusty street 
Children gathered at His feet. 



POEMS ASD HYMXS. 



183 



As of old the Master stands : 
Still with blessings in His hands, 
From green lane and dusty street 
Calls the children to His feet, 
Saying, as in Galilee, 
"Bring the little ones to Me ! " 

Still He puts His j)arting test 
To the hearts that love Him best : 
Simon, as thou lovest Me, 
Let these lambs thy burden be : 
" Other work the world may ask, — 
" Here is love's divinest task I " 

Brother, thou hast clearly heard 
Throuo'h the vears the Master's word I 
In thine heart His voice has said, 
While His hand lay on thy head, 
" Unto thee this task is given, 
" Lead these little feet to heaven ! " 

"Weary is the world and wide : 
Many calls on every side 
Claim our hearts and fill our hands : 
Yet, methinks, the Master stands 
With the old, familiar test : 
This is his who loves Me best I " 



184 



POEMS AND HYMNS. 



When thy day of toil is past, 
And the Master comes at last, 
Be it thine before His Face 
Now to hear His word of grace : 
" In each child entrusted thee 
" Thou hast loved and honored Me ! " 
Malden, 22 Octoler, 1891. 

THE RETURN FROM THE MOUNTAIN. 

Not long on Hermon's holy height 
The heavenly vision fills our sight ; 
We may not breathe that purer air. 
Nor build our tabernacles there ! 

One moment, like the favored Three, 
We share that blessed company, 
Where Moses and Elijah shine, 
Transfigured in the light divine ! 

The vision fades ; the splendor dies : 
The saints have sought again the skies : 
The homely garb the Master wore 
Is bright with sudden glow no more. 



POEMS ASD HYMXS. 



185 



If with the Master we would go, 
Our feet must thread the vale below, 
Where dark the lonely pathways wind. 
The golden glory left behind. 

Where hungTy souls ask One to feed. 
Where wanderers cry for One to lead. 
Where helpless hearts in chains are bound, — 
There shall the Master still be found ! 

Xor Moses nor Elijah then 

We long to see appear again : 

Xo tabernacles by the way 

We build the Master's steps to stay I 

There, bending patient o'er His task, 
Xo raiment white our eyes shall ask. 
Content, while through each cloud we trace 
The glory of the Master's Face I 
Maldex, 13 September, 1891. 



POEMS AND HYMNS, 



FOR THE COMMUNION SEASON. 
I. 

How blest Thy first disciples, Lord, 
Whom Thou didst choose to walk with Thee ; 
Who daily met around Thy board, 
And made Thy home and family ! 

How blest, when throng and press were gone, 
And weary day herseK had fled, 
From all the noisy world withdrawn. 
Alone with Thee to break the bread ! 

Has the long day its burden brought ? 
Are heavy hearts in sorrow bound ? 
What sweet relief in kindly thought ! 
What sympathy with Thee is found ! 

For every care Thou hast an ear ; 
Thou knowest all their changing moods : 
What stirs the timid Philip's fear, — 
Why thoughtful Thomas sadly broods. 

Ah ! who would such a meeting miss ! 
What strength is here to nerve the will ! 
How fair a home for hearts is this ! 
Who would not long to find it still ! 



POEMS AND HYMNS. 



And is the vision vain as sweet ? 
Nay, Lord ! Thy table here is spread ! 
And ever, where disciples meet. 
Thy blessed hands still break the bread 

We see Thee not : yet when we turn, 
These moments melt in memory. 
And all our hearts within us burn, 
For we have met and talked with Thee ! 
Malden, 7 January, 1890. 

n. 

Before us, Lord, Thy board is spread. 

Thy love's unchanging token : 

We share the cup, we take the bread. 

Thy body bruised and broken : 

And at Thy table, met with Thee, 

Thy word, " In memory of Me," 

Once more to us is spoken ! 

No lengthening years of mist and gloom 
Have power to change or bound Thee : 
To-day, as in the upper room 
Thy first disciples found Thee, 
O let Thy Presence still our fears. 
Remove our doubts, and dry our tears, 
While here we gather round Thee ! 



188 



POEMS AND HYMNS, 



AVe come, our hearts anew to yield 

To Thee for Thy possessing : 

We come, with lips but now unsealed, 

A new-found love confessing : 

Grant us, O Lord, Thy promised grace, 

Reveal to each Thy loving Face, 

And breathe on all Thy blessing ! 

Thou knowest all our varied need. 
Our gladness and our grieving : 
What joys allure, what hopes mislead, 
With false lights still deceiving : 
With Thee we leave our troubled past. 
With Thee our future, dim and vast, — 
All things from Thee receiving I 

While here we hold communion sweet, 
The dear, remembered faces 
Of friends unseen, again we meet 
In their familiar places : 
For one with Thee is one with all 
Who hear Thy voice and own Thy call, 
Throughout the starry spaces ! 
Malden, 6 July, 1890. 



POEMS AND HYMNS, 



189 



THE LAST EASTER. 

O Lord of Life, once laid in Joseph's tomb, 
Around Thy grave the garden bursts in bloom, — 
Thy glory breaks the world's long night of gloom I 

Alleluia ! Alleluia I 

Thou for us all didst hang upon the tree ; 
The burden of our sins was borne by Thee ; 
Thy stripes have healed, Thy sorrows set us free ! 

Alleluia ! Alleluia ! 

Now all is o'er, — Thy toil, Thy grief. Thy pain ; 
The vail of death by Thee is rent in twain ; 
Thine earthly loss is our eternal gain ! 

Alleluia ! AUehiia I 

Henceforth, through hours of ease and days of 
care, 

Help us with Thee our daily cross to bear. 
Strong in Thy strength, and brave Thy cup to share ! 

Alleluia I Alleluia ! 

When through dark vales our lonely pathway lies. 
Though hearts may faint, and tears may dim our 
eyes, 

Thy light shall guide our footsteps to the skies I 

Alleluia ! Aileluia ! 



190 



POEMS AND HYMNS 



And when, at last, our work on earth is o'er, 
Lead us, where Thou hast trod the path before, 
Through death to life with Thee f orevermore ! 

Alleluia ! Alleluia ! 

Malden, 2 April, 1893. 



